Your Quarterly Goals Are Too Slow for the Age of AI

Don’t set quarterly goals this week.

They’re too slow for the age of AI. At least the way we’ve been doing them.

Terry Pratchett was one of my favourite authors. In his book Strata, he describes how humanity’s first long-distance spaceships were cryogenic ships. The crew would be frozen in stasis for the 400 years it would take to reach their destination.

It was a big sacrifice. They were leaving their friends behind and they didn’t know if they’d make it. But they were excited. They believed they were on an important mission.

Here’s the thing. Well before those ships reached their destination, space travel technology kept advancing. And it advanced faster and faster.

Long before the cryo ships reached their destination, ships with non-frozen crew members were making that same trip in a few weeks. They were overtaking the old cryo ships.

Humanity decided it was kinder to let the old ships drift rather than wake the crew. I don’t necessarily agree with that decision, but the point is clear: making long-horizon plans during times of rapid change might not be the right move.

Quarterly goals made sense. Until now.

Setting goals (or EOS-style rocks) quarterly assumes a stable rate of change. For people with full-time jobs and limited hours to work on these goals, a quarter felt like the right amount of time.

But AI has compressed execution time dramatically. It now takes a fraction of the time and effort to complete what used to be a quarter-long project.

Website overhauls. Customer research. Funnel builds. Ad testing.

None of these are quarter-long projects anymore. They can be done within a week, some within a day.

The real risk is that your rock goes stale.

New AI tools and upgrades show up mid-quarter. The rock you set in April could be irrelevant by June. Superseded. Or it needs to change completely.

If you’d completed it in four weeks, you’d already have the results. You could pivot when the new thing landed instead of scrambling to adjust a plan that’s already half-finished (or throwing out all that work that never generated results).

I’ve seen this pattern with clients and many other business owners. Capable people moving too slowly for the environment.

Three alternatives to the way you’ve been doing quarterly planning.

I’m not saying you need to stop planning. I started this dramatically to hopefully shake you out of old thinking habits.

Here are three alternatives:

1. Shorter sprints. Move to a Basecamp-style sprint system for 6 weeks followed by two weeks maintenance level, then repeat. You get faster iteration, it forces you to prioritise, and it builds in less intense periods.

Six weeks is enough time to get stuff done, but not enough time to procrastinate. And it’s not so long that you’re putting a lot of effort into something that might need to change.

2. Monthly checkpoints. Keep the quarterly plan, but assume your rocks will probably finish in much less time. Do a regular monthly review, and if the rocks are done, set new ones immediately. Don’t wait for the quarter to end.

3. Bigger rocks. If AI lets you do more, raise the bar. A quarter is still the container, but the ambition inside it should be two to three times what you used to set.

This is my least favourite option because it doesn’t solve the “rapidly changing environment might require faster pivots” problem. But if your business is in a more stable industry, it might be the right fit.

The point isn’t the framework. It’s the speed of feedback.

Quarterly planning worked when the world moved quarterly. When things were slower and didn’t change within a quarter quite so much.

Now the advantage goes to whoever gets feedback fastest.

Smaller businesses have always had an edge over large ones because they could change rapidly. I’ve seen too many businesses calcify by switching to quarterly rocks too soon.

Pick the alternative that fits your business. And don’t be like those cryo ships.

Want help rethinking your quarterly goals? Get in touch, I’m happy to talk it through.