Читать книгу The 12 Week Year for Writers - Michael Lennington - Страница 12

I'm writing this book for a simple reason: I discovered a fantastic system for getting my writing done and I want to share it with as many people as I can. Simply put, the 12 Week Year has been one of the most important ingredients of my professional success. I think it can be the same for you.

But let me back up for just a minute. They say that authors write the books they need to read. Guilty as charged. I started off as one of the most forgetful and least well-organized people you've ever met. Thanks to having been in graduate school for most of my twenties while getting my Ph.D., I didn't own a day planner of any sort until I was 30. At that point, a new job in the “real world” revealed my total lack of organizational skills. When I had to schedule a team meeting for the first time, I discovered not only did I have no idea how to do that, but I also had nowhere to write down anything about the meeting once it was scheduled. With a shock, I realized that I was going to have to get organized if I wanted to survive in the professional world. At that point, someone gave me a copy of Stephen Covey's classic, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which rescued me from some of my worst organizational dysfunctions. More importantly, though, I developed a lifelong passion for productivity systems.

I finally landed my first tenure-track academic job in 2003. Like any newly hired assistant professor, I was panicked about publishing enough to get tenure and at the same time my wife and I were busy raising three young children. After moving into my office, I stood in front of the whiteboard and calculated how much I would need to publish over the next six years. The prospect was overwhelming, to say the least. By that point, I was thoroughly immersed in the productivity literature, but none of the systems I had read about seemed like the right fit.

By happy coincidence, just as I was launching into my academic career, my good friend Michael Lennington was joining forces with Brian Moran to develop and promote the system that would become the 12 Week Year. When I told him that their system sounded like just what I needed, Michael sent me a copy of their materials. I devoured their wisdom about the benefits of creating focused plans based on 12-week “years” and embraced the planning tools they had developed to support the successful execution of my plans. Not only did I become far more productive than I had ever been before, but I also experienced a huge sense of relief when I started focusing on 12-week periods and stopped worrying about what was due six years later. I am happy to say that the system worked so well for me that I published enough for tenure ahead of schedule. Even more importantly, it allowed me to get my writing done while still managing to maintain a healthy relationship with my wife, to help raise our kids, and to juggle all sorts of other projects and obligations. To put it another way, I could never have had the full and satisfying career and personal life I've had if I had not used the 12 Week Year.

I continued to use the 12 Week Year after I got tenure and eventually realized that my students could benefit just as much as I did from it. Much of the advice in this book comes from conversations I've had with hundreds of students as they struggled with papers, theses, and dissertations. I've had similar talks with former students still facing the same challenges as professionals working in their chosen fields. These students not only broadened my understanding of the challenges facing writers of all kinds, but also inspired me to think more deeply about how to overcome those challenges. The old saying that “you don't really know something until you teach it” is spot on in this case. And one of the most important things I have learned from my students is that pretty much everyone's writing can benefit from the 12 Week Year.