Create Discipline and Focus with 90-Day 'Rocks' and a Weekly Meeting Pulse

You might recognize the feeling: each new quarter, you begin with optimism. There’s a sense of resolve, maybe even excitement. Yet by week six, the list of priorities has blurred at the edges, and meetings seem repetitive or off-track. This is common—it’s a quirk of human attention. Left on autopilot, motivation fades and everything starts to feel urgent. The rocks-and-pulse system is a powerful antidote.

Rocks focus your mind: they force you and your team to ask, "What are the few critical things that will really move us forward?" Instead of juggling an overflow of priorities, you choose just three to seven, write them down, and assign someone to own each one. The weekly meeting pulse becomes your organizational heartbeat. Same time, same agenda, every week. You track which rocks are on or off target, flag and solve issues, and get honest about progress—all while keeping meetings efficient.

This rhythm becomes surprisingly comforting. Miss a week, and things drift. Repeat the cycle, and clarity returns, motivation lifts, and you notice fewer things falling through the cracks. There’s less firefighting and more steady, compounding progress. When a team lives this habit, even setbacks lose their sting.

Research in habit formation suggests that limiting focus, breaking goals into short, manageable intervals, and meeting with ritualistic structure leverages the human tendency for routines and checklists. The approach builds both internal discipline and external progress.

Take a stand against chaos: at the start of every quarter, work with your team to nail down just three to seven rocks—your must-win priorities—and make sure each has a real owner, not a committee. Share these goals so everyone can rally behind them. Then, protect time for a tight weekly meeting, not to wheedle at problems endlessly, but to check where each priority stands, call out stuck items, and attack them one by one. Stick to the same structure and time slot for every meeting, and watch as momentum builds and distractions fade. Make this routine non-negotiable, and see your focus become unshakeable.