Some of His Rocks Are 30 Days Now, Not 90
Katalyst runs on quarterly rocks. Luke Johnson made the cycle variable, so some rocks are 30 days and some are still 90. The firm stopped carrying work that had already gone stale.
October 5, 2026
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1 min read
Luke is not describing a planning philosophy, he is describing what kept happening: the team would agree a quarter's priorities, and a month later some of them had already been solved, overtaken or made irrelevant, and the cadence had no way to say so.
The move is small and specific. Keep the operating cadence. Stop assuming every priority decays at the same rate. Some problems hold for a quarter. Some are gone in five weeks, and the firm spends the remaining seven defending a decision nobody believes in.
Why it matters to you.
Most founders pick one of two bad options here. Either you hold the 90-day discipline, which means a predictable rhythm and a list of priorities that quietly stops matching the business. Or you abandon the cadence entirely, which feels responsive for a month and then turns into no plan at all. Johnson did neither. He left the structure in place and made the duration a decision you make per rock, when you set it. The rhythm survives. The dead work does not. The catch is the close-out. A 30-day rock only helps if it actually ends on day 30 with someone saying it is done or it is dropped. A flexible cycle with no close-out discipline is just the second bad option wearing the first one's clothes.
“It doesn't mean we won't have a 90-day rock, it just means that sometimes that doesn't work. We need a 30-day sprint. It's a lot faster, we can iterate quicker on it, and we can move, and sometimes by the time you get to day 90, the thing you started with on day one is just not even a thing anymore. - Luke Johnson, CEO and Principal, Katalyst”
Your one thing.
Look at this quarter's priorities and mark the ones that were still the right problem on day 30. Whatever you mark, set the next one's length to match.
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