In order to live your best life, you need to consciously choose how you spend your time. Being deliberate with your time is the key to being happy and productive. As someone once said, 'No Wind Blows In Favor Of A Ship Without Direction'. Without consciously deciding where you want to focus your energy, your life will be dictated by whatever fate throws your way. I remember reading a book by Tony Robbins just after I had turned 18. Tony Robbins writing is very passionate and persuasive. In this book, he stressed how writing your goals down is the key to getting 'juice out of life'. Everyone likes juice (🍊🍊🍊) so I committed there and then to write my goals down once every year.

I vaguely remember the book recommending reviewing your goals more regularly but that seemed like too much hard work at the time. My goal-setting process involved sitting down for an hour once a year and creating a list of cool things I wanted to do in the upcoming year. Granted when I was 18 this list did not contain tasks as productive as my current list. I'm not sure meeting girls, drinking, and partying in Ibiza counts for life-altering goals to strive for, but it helped me start a habit.

Recently I read the excellent book The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran. The 12 Week Year makes the case that the people who follow goals make the most progress when a deadline is looming. When it comes to life goals, setting them once a year does not provide enough urgency. To become more productive, you should introduce more urgency in your goal-setting process. The book claimed this can be done by creating a fictional 12-week year. Every 12 weeks is treated as a new year. You set your goals as normal but they all need to be finished within 3 months. The book claims that undertaking this goal-setting exercise 4 times a year will be a lot more effective than simply doing it once a year. The process will make you take action quicker, make you break your goals into smaller tasks and it will give you time to pivot based on your learnings, I agree.

This year instead of planning out my whole year, I am committing to my first-ever 12-week year! In this post, I’m sharing my 1st 12-week year goals. With the world the way it is, I'm not sure it will be the best 3 months ever, however, I am committing to them! If you think the concept of a 12-week year sounds interesting then I am challenging you to join me.

When writing goals down the key is to be specific. The more specific and detailed you are when writing down your goals, the more you will increase your odds of getting shit done. When it comes to goal writing, the most popular technique to follow is the SMART goal:

Goal!

An example of a smart goal would be 'I will write a blog post about goals and publish it on my website by 29th January 2021'. In this post, I challenge you to write down your first 12-week year now. Open a spreadsheet, like Sheets, and write a list of the shit you want to get done in SMART format. All you need to do is commit to finishing them all within three months. Let's see if we can make the start of 2021 the most productive ever! I would love to hear your goals, especially programming and tech-related goals, so leave any comments below!

🎯 Big Goals (To be completed by the end of 2021)

🥇 By the end of the year, I would like to create a new business that makes 1k a month. I have no idea what business will be yet. In the first 12-week year, my aim is to do all the research as to what this might be. My current thinking is an e-commerce store. This is not set in stone so keep your eyes peeled 👀.

🥈 To continue to improve the production of my Youtube videos. In 2020, I invested quite a lot in time, effort, and hardware in order to improve the production of my videos. Due to all my amazing supporters, I'm getting more subscribers and positive feedback! I think I still have room to improve. This year, I'm moving house so I'll finally have space to set-up a proper studio. The plan is a buy a new camera to make improved 4K content, a new mac that allows me to edit videos, and to undertake a video editing course. I am also committing to producing one video a week for all of 2021! This year's aim is 1k subs & 4,000 watching hours. Please help me out by subscribing!

🥉Complete a house renovation. I am in the final stages of buying a new house. The house we are buying needs a lot of work. As we are likely to be in lockdown for a good part of the year, the aim is to renovate it to a standard that we can rent it out for a profit.

📦 Content Creation

In my content-creation business, I am going to release these things:

  • Finish writing Episerver The Missing Manual ✔️

  • Finish writing Umbraco Secrets Exposed ✔️

  • Start writing third-book ✔️

  • Publish 12 Youtube Video ✔️

  • Finish Umbraco V8 Youtube Series ❌

  • Start creating a course to sell ❌

  • Publish 24 blog posts ✔️

  • Publish 12 episodes of my weekly newsletter, the Sunday sessions ✔️

🏃‍♂️ Personal

In my life, I'm committing to doing this:

  • Complete on the house I'm trying to buy ✔️

  • Get Nike Run Total KM over 4500k (2020 aim is over 5000k total, starting from 4000k) ✔️

  • Create a home-gym ✔️

  • 10k Steps every day ✔️

🖱️ Coding

I am going to create these cool things:

- Create a simple todo app using Svelte. I've heard a lot about this framework and I want to create a simple app to learn more. ✔️https://github.com/jondjones-poc/svelte-profile-form

📖 Reading/Learning

I want to read these books:

- Groupon Adventures ✔️

What are your goals for 2021? Have any tips for me? Please share!