Free planning guide · 90 minutes
A goal only counts if it changes what you do on Tuesday.
The six-step system that turns quarterly goals into Monday's task list.
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“Two days of intensity followed by eleven weeks of silence produces the same result as not planning. The cadence is the plan — the offsite is just where it gets written down.”
— From The Plan That Reaches The Work, Waya's free planning guide
The Challenge
Most plans die quietly, around week four
Almost every company at your size can produce a plan — two days offsite, a deck, three objectives, a set of key results everyone nods at. Then the quarter starts. Someone asks how you're tracking, and the room goes quiet, because nobody has opened the doc since the day it was written. By March, the plan is a file in a folder and the team is working on whatever came up that week.
The step that gets skipped is translation — turning an objective into projects, projects into tasks with a deliverable and an owner, and putting those tasks in the system your team already uses. That translation is what the guide walks you through, in about 90 minutes.
- The plan nobody graded — you never find out which key results had no owner, so you just write six new ones and repeat
- Objectives that are actually projects — "launch the pricing page" is work, not the outcome it's meant to produce
- The exec team owning everything — leadership in name, a bottleneck in practice, capped at what four busy people can carry
- Planning as an event — two days of intensity, eleven weeks of silence, same result as not planning at all
What's Inside
The six-step system
Each step is expanded in the guide with the traps that derail it and four worked examples from our own work. Run the whole thing with your leadership team and last quarter's plan in front of you.
- 01Grade last quarter (15 min): score every key result 0 to 1, then ask who actually worked on it. The count nobody touched is your real capacity signal.
- 02Three objectives, not seven (10 min): each one a sentence about an outcome, not an activity — what a leadership team can hold while running the company.
- 03Numbers with owners (20 min): two to four key results per objective, each with a real starting number, a target, and one name — never a team.
- 04Cluster into projects (20 min): group the key results delivered by the same body of work. Three to five projects for the whole company.
- 05Break into deliverables (20 min): five to ten tasks per project, each with a thing you can point at when it's done.
- 06Wire it in (5 min): put every task in the system your team already opens Monday morning, then set the review cadence before anyone leaves the room.
From Our Own Work
Four rooms this exact system ran in
Specific targets, real owners, real numbers — this is what the translation looks like once it leaves the whiteboard.
Healthcare · Hospital GI suite
Targets precise enough to miss
Room turnover from 29 minutes to 15, procedures per room from 10.4 to 13, referral-to-procedure wait from 5 months to 3. They finished at 23.7 minutes, 11.4 procedures, and 2 months — two targets missed, one beaten, and the miss revealed a second constraint they hadn't planned for.
Operations · Warehouse
A plan that enforced itself
Instead of writing the new quality-control policy in a document, the team built it into the app — error rate below 1 percent moved a picker to sampled inspection, past 1.5 percent moved them back, tied to their bonus. The plan didn't depend on a manager remembering it mid-shift.
Logistics · Fulfillment, in crisis
Two tracks, both standard work
Daily manual triage to stop the bleeding, and a systems rebuild so it stopped for good — both written into daily standard work, not a project doc, so the fix would survive the next reorganization. Fill rate went from 75 percent to 99, and stayed there through the following year.
Distribution · Losing its only supplier
Fourteen months of parallel work
Planned backward from a target state, with success metrics defined for each of five scenarios they might face. The business kept running and grew from about $75M to $155M during the transition — the plan held because every piece had an owner, a deliverable, and a date.
“If the answer is ‘we'll have made progress on it,’ it is not a task yet.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Before you download
Is the guide really free?
Yes. Enter your email and we send the guide straight to your inbox. No sales call required.
Who is this for?
Founders and leadership teams running quarterly planning — OKRs, key results, or any goal-setting cycle that needs to turn into real, tracked work.
How long does the session take?
About 90 minutes, run once per quarter with your leadership team in the room and last quarter's plan in front of you.
What if we can't cut our objectives down to three?
This is the most common place teams get stuck. It is a facilitation problem, not a thinking problem — the guide shows you how to chair that conversation.
What if we run out of energy before step four?
That is the second most common stall, and it is exactly where plans start reaching real work. The guide flags it so you can protect the time for it.
Do we need special software to run this?
No. The session runs with pen, paper, or a whiteboard. You plug the output into whatever system your team already uses on Monday morning.
Get the plan that reaches the work
Free, 15-page guide — six steps, four traps to avoid, and four real examples from our own work.