The 12 Week Year for Writers. Michael Lennington

to start or maybe even what to write about. This sort of block appears quite often among graduate students who are paralyzed by the prospect of picking the topic that will define them as scholars. It also afflicts professional writers who are bored of their usual genres and topics and have no idea what to do next. Many people have trouble getting started simply because they hate writing or find it boring or difficult (this explains why so many projects get finished the night before they're due).

      Writer's block can also appear mid-project, whether from boredom or frustration, sucking all the wind from your sails and making it impossible to write another paragraph. These sorts of challenges are especially common on long projects when it's easy for “topic fatigue” to set in, but mid-project writer's block can also crop up thanks to plain old exhaustion. Asking your brain to deliver at too high a level for too long turns out to be a great recipe for writer's block.

For many writers, the completion of a report, manuscript, or thesis is the single most stressful period, and the time at which they face their most severe writer's block. I have seen students get so nervous about finishing their theses that one poor soul developed an inability to go into his study at home. I've seen others develop serious health conditions. More commonly, when writers worry about whether their work will be good enough, their productivity slows to a crawl. Projects that should take a month or two to write instead take six months, or even a year. I know one tenured professor who has become so concerned about negative reviews that when they do manage to finish a manuscript, they now just file it in their desk drawer.

      But here's the deal: All writers face these challenges. It doesn't mean you are a bad writer, that your project is no good, or that you should quit and find a new job. Writer's block is simply an unavoidable reality that everyone who writes must face. Most professional writers have suffered from most of, if not all, the challenges on this list at one time or another. But what successful writers have figured out is that productivity is a matter of pressing on through these inevitable challenges.

WHY SHINY NEW APPS WON'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM

      If you're like most writers, you've tried all kinds of things to get more writing done. I sure have. One of the most tempting things to do when you're stuck is to look around for shortcuts and technological fixes. There are thousands of apps out there promising to solve all your writing problems. Who hasn't downloaded a cool new Pomodoro timer, or a social media blocker, or a new writing app that promises effortless productivity?

Thanks to the digital revolution, most writers have spent dozens, if not hundreds of hours researching, testing, and mastering an ever-expanding writing stack. By writing stack, I mean the applications writers use to get their writing done. Some writers have a short stack of just a few key apps, while others might routinely use ten or more. In any case, the goal of every writing stack is the same: to make the process of writing as efficient and enjoyable as possible.

      Unfortunately, none of these apps hold the secret recipe for more productive writing careers. The prolific science fiction author Ray Bradbury once put it this way, “Put me in a room with a pad and a pencil and set me up against a hundred people with a hundred computers - I'll outcreate every … sonofabitch in the room.” Like all shortcuts, writing apps only address the symptoms, not the fundamental source of our challenges. Writing is hard, so we look to writing apps that promise “focused” or “distraction free” writing, or timers that will cure our time management problems and help us achieve “flow.” Don't misunderstand, many of these apps are great at what they do, and I use some of them myself, but they function at the tactical level. They can help you write a bit faster, or get your endnotes done more easily, or block out distractions.

If you're focused on the tactical level, though, you may be missing what psychologists call the executive functions: planning, strategy, and process control. Recent academic research bears out just how important thinking strategically is. In a series of experiments conducted with students at Stanford University and the University of Michigan, researchers found that the ability to achieve a range of goals (getting good grades, losing weight, learning to program, etc.) and to perform challenging and unfamiliar tasks in a laboratory setting was closely related to having a “strategic mindset.” A person with a strategic mindset is someone who routinely prompts themselves to think strategically about their situation. In the study, the most successful students were those who reported most frequently asking themselves questions like: “What can I do to help myself?”, “How else can I do this?”, and “Is there a way to do this even better?”

      Most writers (like most people generally), however, don't approach their work strategically. Most writers don't have a rock-solid system for planning, conducting, and tracking their work on a regular basis. Instead, many writers start with vague and ambitious goals (Write a novel! Publish a world-famous newsletter!) and then fail to create realistic and focused plans capable of helping achieve them. For others, problems emerge when they get stuck or lose motivation halfway through a project. Without a strategy for staying on track their momentum fades, their progress slows to a crawl, and their project winds up seriously delayed or abandoned.

      Think of it this way: the greatest writing app in the world isn't going to help if you don't sit down to write often enough. The slickest social media blocker isn't going to do much good if you don't know what you're supposed to be doing when you sit down to write. Productive writers, on the other hand, have all uncovered a timeless truth: If you don't have a strategy and a plan for making the best use of your tools, even the best tools can't help.

THE SOLUTION IS THE 12 WEEK YEAR

Writing is hard, but a great writing system can make it a lot easier. The 12 Week Year is an execution system created by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington. Over many years, I have used the system to organize my own research and writing with great results. I think of it as a strategic operating system for your writing. Where individual apps focus on a small piece of the overall picture, the 12 Week Year pushes you to think strategically so that you can answer the most fundamental questions about your writing: What is my vision for the future? What are my writing goals? What are the best tactics to achieve those goals? How can I manage my writing process to ensure that I stay focused, productive, and on track? Individual apps help you do one specific thing better. The 12 Week Year will help you do all of them better.

      How the 12 Week Year Saved My Career

      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.

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