The case for six-week sprints over quarterly planning

Hey 🙂

Someone on the team recently asked a fair question: “I’m used to thinking in quarters. Why six weeks? Why should we bother?”

It’s a good question, and I want to answer it properly — because I think when you understand the reasoning, it actually changes how you work.

The problem with 90 days

I’ve worked in quarters. Most businesses do. And I get it — there’s a rhythm to thinking in three-month blocks, especially when you’re tracking numbers and metrics.

But here’s what I kept experiencing: 90 days is just too long for projects.

It’s long enough for a project to grow arms and legs. It’s long enough to keep doing something that stopped working two months ago. You can be halfway through a quarter and already know that the thing you’re working on isn’t the right thing — but because you’re locked into a 90-day window, you keep going. You push through to the postmortem. And honestly? I’m not sure that’s all that productive.

I also noticed my own enthusiasm declining. By the time I got to the end of a quarter and did a review, I’d realise something should have changed earlier, or we’d been doing too many things at once, or it had been long enough for everything to just slowly drift off track. The window was too wide.

Two weeks, on the other hand, is too short. You barely get started before you’re wrapping up. There’s no real depth to the work.

Six weeks sits right in the middle — and once you experience it, it’s hard to go back.

What six weeks actually does

The core thing a six-week sprint does is create a constraint. And constraints are good.

When the question becomes “what can we actually ship in six weeks?” it forces you to look at a project and right-size it. You can’t let it balloon. You have to make it small enough to finish. That sounds limiting, but it’s actually the opposite — it’s what gets things done.

You can also literally see six weeks on a calendar. It’s this month and a bit of the next. That makes planning real. You can pick a start date, pick an end date, work backwards, assign deadlines to the jobs that need to happen, and actually build a plan that means something. I’ve found six weeks to be the most tangible, most plannable window for almost anything.

And there’s something else: the last week of a sprint has its own energy. Thursday of the final week, you know exactly what needs to get over the line, and you sit down and you just get it done. That kind of motivated finish happens because the deadline is real and visible. You can’t get that feeling at week 7 of a 13-week quarter.

How we build a sprint

A sprint starts with a start date and an end date. We plan these in advance for the year ahead — usually around school holidays and things like that — so there are no surprises.

Once a project is agreed on, it’s a case of sitting down with the person who owns it and writing down all the jobs that need to happen. Putting them in order. Putting dates on them. Working out what needs to happen before certain things, who needs help and where, what resources are needed. Then those deadlines go in the calendar.

The frame I use here is the idea of a box and a spine — you can read more about that separately — but the short version is: once someone has their project, their plan, and their calendar blocked out, they’ve got everything they need to go execute.

During a sprint, we use a weekly rhythm called the 3-1-3:

• Three things that represent progress this week
• One objective that’s the single most important focus for next week
• Three tasks that will move the needle on that objective

We also try to protect at least 20% of each week — roughly 8 hours out of 40 — for deep work on the most important project. And sometimes mid-sprint, we’ll pull the team together for a working session rather than doing everything async. There’s a lot you can knock out when you’re just in a room together getting stuff done.

The cool-down matters too

Between sprints there’s a cool-down period — usually two weeks, sometimes three. This isn’t downtime. It’s when we:

• Reflect on what we shipped (or didn’t)
• Do a postmortem on anything that didn’t go well
• QA and tighten up anything that needs it
• Plan and organise the next sprint

The cool-down is what makes the sprint sustainable. It gives you a moment to breathe, review, and set up properly before the next push. And honestly, it creates a rhythm that keeps motivation high — by the time you’re finishing a sprint and feeling a bit tired, there’s a cool-down coming. And by the time cool-down is done, you’re ready to go again.

The honest answer on morale

Here’s what I’ve seen happen when teams move from quarterly thinking to six-week sprints: people actually focus.

A 90-day window creates an illusion. You think you can do loads. And so you try to do loads. And then everything slips. With six weeks, you can only pick one or two projects. That’s it. And rather than that feeling like a limitation, it actually feels like relief. You know what you’re doing. You know when it’s due. You know what done looks like.

People can also put up with hard work for six weeks. If you’re in a project that’s gruelling or difficult — maybe you don’t even love it — six weeks is manageable. You can see the end. And at the other side of it, there’s a new project waiting.

That combination — clear focus, visible deadline, recovery built in — is what keeps the team moving well. Not frantic, not stressed, not overcommitted. Just moving.

You can still think in quarters

One thing worth saying: you don’t have to abandon quarterly thinking entirely. For numbers, metrics, business performance — quarters are fine. But for projects, six weeks is the right unit. You can run two six-week sprints (plus cool-downs) inside a quarter if you want to. The frameworks do have to be in conflict.

The key shift is this: stop asking “what are we doing this quarter?” when it comes to projects, and start asking “what are we shipping in the next six weeks?” Or even better: “what problem do we want to solve in the next six weeks?” Those two questions do something that quarterly planning rarely does — they force you to commit to finishing something specific.

There’s also a pattern I’ve noticed that’s worth naming: as the window of time increases, so does the overestimation of what can be achieved in it. A 90-day horizon makes people feel like they can take on the world. A six-week horizon makes people get real.

The measure of success

The only real metric for a sprint is simple: did we ship it?

Not “did we make progress?” Not “did we learn a lot?” Did it get done? Is it out the door?

I hate things dragging on. And the six-week frame, with its real deadline and its end-of-sprint push, is the best system I’ve found for making sure things actually finish. That’s why we do it.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.