Читать книгу The 12 Week Year for Writers - Michael Lennington - Страница 19

Originally a technique designed to help athletes achieve peak performance, periodization is a strategy for improving focus, concentration, and urgency around a specific goal. For athletes, periodization is a regimen in which they concentrate their efforts on a single skill for a limited period – often between four and six weeks. After each period, the athlete moves to the next skill. In various forms, periodization is standard practice for athletes training at the highest levels.

The promise of periodization lies at the heart of the 12 Week Year approach. The same technique that delivered for Olympians can deliver powerful results for people in their professional and personal lives, with a few modifications. Unlike athletes who can dedicate their time to training, most professionals don't have the ability to take off months to train. Most people with “real jobs” must find ways to improve while still getting their work done every day. Periodization, as it has been modified for work, helps you define what's important for you to do right now, today, so that you can crank out those newsletters, finish that play, or write the next great American novel.

The 12 Week Year system provides a structure that will help you avoid the pitfalls of annual thinking and other common challenges writers face along their journey. Most of the time the problem is not a lack of ideas, but a lack of execution – of getting the writing done. It's not even that people don't know they face an execution problem, it's that they don't know how to confront and overcome the problem on a daily basis. That's where the power of writing with the 12 Week Year comes into play.

By redefining your year as a 12-week period, the 12 Week Year shifts your mindset, encouraging you to focus on just the most critical activities that determine success, and on the daily execution of those things to ensure you achieve your long-term goals. It also creates that sense of urgency that is lost in the annual planning process. With your deadline – the end of the “year” – in full view at all times, you will have greater clarity about what is important and the sense of urgency to motivate you to do what is necessary each day.

The urgency of a 12 Week Year is healthier and more productive than the urgency experienced at the end of a 12-month year. As urgency blooms in the fourth quarter of an annual execution cycle, there is often a mountain of results to deliver in less than 3 months. That kind of stress leads to bad decisions, unwise shortcuts, as well as damaged health and relationships. On the other hand, the productive tension that the 12 Week Year creates arises from the results needed in the present moment, without the unproductive dread of delivering past results that didn't happen earlier.