Improve your writing productivity with a proven system

The 12 Week Year for Writers is a transformative roadmap to accelerating your writing output with a series of proven strategies that writers in any genre can implement.

• Clarify your writing vision
• Connect your daily actions with your vision via a 12 Week Plan for your writing
• Focus on just the most important tactics necessary to reach your goals
• Create a healthy sense of urgency and motivation by shortening your planning horizon to twelve weeks
• Reduce your stress about hitting goals by increasing the predictability and consistency of your writing

• Build confidence in your ability to accomplish whatever writing projects you can imagine
• Identify and resolve problems in your writing more quickly by reviewing your performance on a weekly basis
• Reduce your anxiety by clearly identifying when it is time to write and when it is not time to write
• Improve your work/life/writing balance by ensuring that your weekly schedule provides adequate time for each
• Keep your projects on track by providing a weekly routine that reinforces your ability to get your writing done

A few more details about the book

Writing is hard. Any writer can tell you that. Procrastination, lack of focus, lack of motivation…the list of challenges writers face in being productive is long and varied. But whatever the problem, the result is usually the same: many writers simply struggle to sit down and be productive on a consistent basis. 

This book will show you how to use the 12 Week Year to become a more productive writer by giving you a set of proven tools for planning and managing the execution of your writing. It won’t do that by telling you things you don’t know. Most writers are all too familiar with their personal productivity challenges and know what kinds of things they need to do to be more productive. But what most writers don’t have is a system for overcoming those challenges on a regular basis. The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge, it’s a lack of execution.

The 12 Week Year will help you radically improve your writing productivity in many ways. Here are three of the most important: 

First, by shortening your time horizon, the system will help you create more realistic, more strategic, and more focused plans. What we don’t plan to do, we almost never accomplish. If you aren’t doing any planning today, then the 12 Week Year will rock your world. Even if you do create plans, however, the 12 Week Year offers a better way. Most planning systems center on annual thinking. But plans that try to forecast the future are prone to fall apart when the future inevitably fails to obey our predictions. Instead, you will create 12 Week Plans that allow you to identify the most important things that need to happen right now. You will spend more time making progress and less on wasted motion.

Second, the system is great for your motivation. It can be difficult to maintain motivation when the finish line of your writing project is far off, as is often the case. The solution is to chunk your writing projects into a series of smaller projects. These smaller projects will then become the goals of your 12 Week Plans. Since your deadlines will always be in view, never more than twelve weeks away, you will enjoy a healthy sense of urgency and motivation that long-term planning lacks.

Third, the system will give you a powerful suite of tools to manage your writing.  Making good plans is just the first big step. The second and equally critical step is to have a process for managing your execution of your plan. How will you keep track of your progress? How will you know when you’re doing well or poorly? How will you keep yourself accountable? How will you manage your time? What will you do when circumstances force you to change your plan? The 12 Week Year’s Weekly Execution Routine will help you stay on track and reach your goals.

Contents

Section I. Why You Need a New Writing System
1. Why You Need a New Writing System
2. The 12 Week Year for Writers

Section II. Getting Started with the 12 Week Year
3. Crafting Your Writing Vision
4. Creating Your 12 Week Plan
5. Creating Your Model Week
6. The Weekly Writing Group
7. Scorekeeping
8. The Weekly Execution Routine

Section III. How the 12 Week Year Will Help You Write
9. Making Your First 12 Week Year a Success
10. How to Use the 12 Week Year to Write More
11. How to Manage Multiple Writing Projects
12. How to Write Together with the 12 Week Year
13. The Writer’s Mindset
14. Parting Thoughts

Section IV. The 12 Week Year in Action
15. How I Used the 12 Week Year to Write This Book
16. Frequently Asked Questions