Never miss twice. Or... miss as many as you need to, until you're ready to start again 🌱
Thinking differently about time in 2025
When I started Human Dynamics last year, I figured that if I kept it up weekly, I'd have a nice little 24-week data set to evaluate at the end of the year. The goal was, of course, to have enough iterations to design some amazing systems for 2025.
I don't think anyone sets out to write a weekly newsletter just eight times. I certainly didn't. Surprisingly, I learnt as much from the weeks I didn't publish as the weeks I did (I just didn't tell you about it at the time).
I found the draft copy of this edition under a journal entry dated September 19th! The first line was "pressing the reset button after an accidental two week break" ... obviously I didn't press it hard enough 😅.
Taking into account that I planned to publish until 20 December, take a short break and resume on 10 January, I've missed 28 weeks all up. A few more than the pithy soundbite of advice that people love to quote from James Clear: never miss twice.
What people don't tell you is that those three words appear in Atomic Habits under the subheading "HOW TO RECOVER QUICKLY WHEN YOUR HABITS BREAK DOWN". He was writing about RECOVERY not slavery (to habits)! And he was describing what works for him when a habit is interrupted.
“Perfection is not possible. Before long, an emergency will pop up - you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time.”
Indeed.
“Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.”
I'm not a huge fan of absolutes when it comes to habits and productivity because humans are essentially a sample size of one. But the thing James Clear is 100% right about is this:
The thing is, I never actually had a weekly publishing habit. Instead, I had an almighty publishing struggle for eight weeks (I absolutely fell to the level of my non-systems)… and eventually I let go of the struggle so I could focus on more important things for a season.
Things like:
managing the food for my twin boys' hockey team during national tournament week (and recovering from that week)
leading the congregational singing at my cousin's son's wedding
supporting my boys through their last ever school exams
some intense professional development in the area of coercive and controlling leadership, and high control groups (learning how to recognise and recover from them, not how to create them!) - starting with the world's first Decult Conference and finishing with two days of Cult Recovery Training led by world-renowned Dr Gillie Jenkinson
attending the first ever global gathering of Emotional Culture Deck practitioners and consultants in Queenstown
delivering two workshops on Emotional Fitness at New Zealand's annual Emergency Communications Conference
helping my daughter move cities so she could start a new job and a new life in the capital
having my five yearly surveillance colonoscopy (I had successful surgery for bowel cancer in December 2010)
savouring every last school event that my boys were in - like this phenomenal performance of Cold Play’s Viva la Vida
eight full-on days visiting family and friends in Australia before Christmas
hosting Christmas! 🎄✨
moving my home office to a different room in the house
managing the logistics for multiple comings and goings of multiple humans in our home from early January to mid-March
delivering an Emotional Culture workshop for ~30 staff at a Wellington independent school before the new school year started, helping them create a renewed sense of belonging after a disruptive end to 2024
moving one of our boys to the capital for tertiary study
a last minute decision to move my butt for bowel cancer in February
planning and delivery of the first public ECD Emotional Change Strategy course in the South Island
planning and hosting (today!) a recruitment webinar for PRINZ (the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand)
So... I'm OK with missing 28 weeks, on balance. But I'm stopping the streak there.
And one of the things that's helping me do it is the mindset and structure of The 12 Week Year. (Funnily enough, this book was also in my newsletter notes from September 19th!)
I first came across it years ago, but like a lot of people I made the mistake of thinking it was just clever marketing for a quarterly planning process. It's not.
It's a completely different way to think about time and execution.
Quarterly goals are usually part of an annual plan. You start with big yearly goals and spread them out over the year. They might be broken down into smaller chunks (like quarters), but ultimately you're still thinking in terms of the full year. There's always a sense that you have time later to make up for a bad quarter early on, leading to diluted focus and procrastination. (The most productive time of most people's year is the four weeks before it ends, right?)
With a 12 Week Year, there's no time to muck around. You treat each 12 week period as a full year. This creates greater focus by highlighting the value of each week - you don't have Q2 (or any other quarter for that matter) to fall back on.
But the thing I love most about The 12 Week Year is that between each cycle of 12 weeks is a mandatory one week BREAK.
The 12 Week Year is a rhythm of focused execution and rest.
In this one week break you reflect on the past 12 weeks (what worked, what didn't), plan the next 12 week cycle, rest, and recover.
Imagine: rest and recovery hand in hand with focused execution. 🤯
My experience of annual planning, certainly in the organisations where I've been an employee, is that the only time rest or recovery happens is during a mandatory Christmas close down period, where you’re often too shattered to even enjoy the break. Other than that, it's just continuous execution.
The hamster wheel of harm.
I love a good analogy so here’s one that helps me understand The 12 Week Year. It’s like choosing to run a series of sprints instead of a marathon.
If you like marathons, quarterly goals based on annual planning might be for you - they’re just like running a marathon in four parts. You can start with the intention of pacing yourself across all 42km, carefully conserving energy early on, knowing you can potentially make up time later. There's a long horizon, so nothing's really urgent. If you fall behind in the first leg, you’ve still got 30km to catch up.
With The 12 Week Year, each finish line is clearly visible just ahead. 🏁 You can afford to give your endeavours focus and energy because you’re not saving yourself for a distant goal. You train, race, pause briefly to rest and reset, then sprint again. Every week counts. You can't afford to coast, and you don't burn out trying to maintain a year-long pace without stopping.
The other great thing is that, whereas calendar years are often driven by fiscal timeframes and reporting cycles, a 12 Week Year is a self-contained cycle that you own. You decide when your sprints start and finish.
Next week I start another 12 Week Year - there are no carry over goals, it’s like a new year all over again and I genuinely can’t wait.
Here's to a different way of thinking about time ⏳
Kathryn
PS - I know that for many employees, you can’t escape fiscal timeframes and planning structures set by others. I’ve been there. But I also wish I’d discovered this when I was an employee so I could operate my own rebellious sprint system in parallel - for both work and home projects. What’s stopping you?
