📅 12 Week Year. Closure.

I want to finish my story about the first iteration of the 12 Week Year. I completed it on the 30th of March and then took a three-week pause. Now I’m in the 2nd week of my 2nd iteration.

Main conclusion: I can confidently confirm that during the active 12 weeks, I accomplished more than I did in the previous year for the chosen topics. The methodology works, and I will continue to use it.

At the beginning, I chose two goals: 🇩🇪 improve my spoken German and develop my 🖼 Instagram account. Along the way, I added 🧘 health. Let’s see what I achieved during these weeks.

🇩🇪 Improve spoken German
- Completed 60 lessons in the Üben app
- 11 lessons on italki, which is 6 hours and 30 minutes
- 10 podcasts of 6 minutes each
- At least 7,000 words written for podcast scripts
- Read the first book in German
- 2,000 words of article retellings

🖼 Instagram development
- Revived the account
- Published 18 Reels
- 1 Reel went “viral”
- Published 3 posts
- Gained 555 followers
- Learned how to edit videos
- Learned how to add subtitles
- Create better content now

🧘 Health
- 40 liters of water (8 weeks, 5 days a week)
- 200 minutes of meditation

To me, this is a lot! And what I like about this methodology is that it’s as simple as “checking the checkboxes.” There is a week, there are checkboxes that you have planned, and you just need to take actions so you can check them off. I use this Notion template to manage it.

🔑 My key learnings
1. It works!
2. Taking small steps toward the goal is enough. It gives a sense of progress.
3. Every action takes time—more time than you expect when you imagine it. You need to account for that.
4. Integrate your work goals into the plan. You work 8 hours a day anyway, so why not add structure to it?
5. The plan is not set in stone. You can change and adapt your weekly checkboxes, but stick to the goal.
6. Just start

I know some people have already been inspired by the idea of the 12 Week Year methodology from my posts. I hope more people join ✨