The 90-Day Sprint: How I Set and Hit Goals Every Quarter for 4 Years

Author

Aaron Hayslip

Published

May 15, 2026

Read

12 min

Practices

Plan, Anchor

For 4 years in a row, I ran a paid goal-setting cohort called "90 Days of Action". It all began because my co-founder told me a story about a challenge his previous boss gave him.

We were in the process of bootstrapping our business (FreedUp), had 0 income (with 7 kids combined) and needed to build our business, fast.

For extra accountability, we decided to ask 10 other founders to join us on a 90 day challenge where, together, we'd sprint toward our goals.

So I put together a Notion website (still lives here: 90daysofaction.com), setup a Stripe account (we each put in $1,500 for extra skin-in-the-game) and built a system for achieving massive goals, in 90 days.

The following is the same system we shared with each cohort, and here are some of the results:

• 4 new businesses were launched.
• An investor closed 7 figures in new capital.
• A social impact leader raised $600k for his non-profit.
• FreedUp went from 0 to $700k ARR.
• A fitness coach doubled his revenue and went full-time on his side project.
• A wealth management entrepreneur closed multiple 6 figures in new revenue.

What will it do for you?

Phase 1: Set Direction (1–2 hours, one sitting)

This is the foundation. Skip it and you'll spend 90 days sprinting in the wrong direction. Block two hours, sit down with a notebook or blank doc, and work through these four steps without stopping.

Step 1: Reflect on the last quarter (or year)

Write your highlights and lowlights across three areas:

• Health,physical, mental, emotional
• Wealth,career, business, finances, giving
• Relationships,spouse, kids, friends, community

Don't overthink it. Just dump what comes to mind. You're building self-awareness, not a thesis.

For example:

Health

• Highlights: lifted 3x/week for 8 weeks; averaged 7+ hours sleep; cut alcohol to weekends
• Lowlights: stress snacking at night; skipped cardio entirely; screens in bed most nights

Wealth

• Highlights: shipped 2 key projects; asked for (and got) a comp adjustment; cleaned up monthly budget + subscriptions
• Lowlights: avoided pipeline/sales follow-up; no clear weekly "top 3"; impulse spend $600+ on "business tools"

Relationships

• Highlights: 1:1 date night most weeks; took the kids on 2 solo outings; consistent Sunday family dinner
• Lowlights: brought work stress home; too much phone at dinner; fewer meaningful friend check-ins

Step 2: Cast a 1-year vision

For each of the three areas, write what you want to be true at the end of the year. Be specific,numbers, what it looks like, what it feels like.

• Health: I'm walking around at 15% body fat, strong and athletic. I lift 3x/week, do zone 2 cardio 2x/week, and average 7.5 hours of sleep. My baseline anxiety is low; I feel calm and steady most days.
• Wealth: FreedUp is reliably profitable with clean metrics and predictable delivery. I work in a focused 4–5 hour window most weekdays; no constant Slack/email checking. We've built a real "machine": clear offers, clear SOPs, and a bench of A-players.
• Relationships: My marriage feels connected and fun: weekly date night, regular conversations that aren't logistics. I'm consistently present with the kids (phone away at dinner + bedtime), and we have 1–2 "core memories" trips each year. I have a small circle of friends I see monthly and I feel rooted in community.

Step 3: Determine baseline

We're now going to see if you have capacity for audacious goals. This is the most important step and the one most people skip.

For each area, ask yourself, "If nothing changes here for the next 6 months, am I okay?"

Another way to frame it: if the next 6 months in this area look like the last 3 months, will things hold together? Baseline isn't your ideal. It's "nothing will burn down if I don't focus on it for a bit."

Here's the rule: if an area is NOT at baseline, you must focus there. You can't go hard on wealth if your marriage is falling apart. You can't chase a revenue goal if your health is deteriorating. Fix the foundation first.

Example baselines for each area:

• Health,15% bodyfat, exercising 3–5x/week, alcohol restricted to 1 night/week
• Wealth,6 months emergency fund, budgeting within $1k/month
• Relationships,weekly date with spouse, work restricted to 40 hrs/week, free on weekends

If you're okay if none of these improve over the next 6 months, then you're free to work on what you want during these next 90 days!

But if any of these areas are off, then these next 90 days need to be about addressing this area.

No sense getting shredded if you're in debt.

Step 4: Set a quarterly theme

What is the point of this next quarter? Narrowing your focus will help you determine the goals.

Some examples from my past quarters:

• Q1,"Take action, get data, be disciplined"
• Q2,"Regroup with the family, focus on presence"
• Q3,"Inner peace"

In this year, Q1 was all about sprinting toward business goals. Then Q2 I needed to refocus on my family and in Q3 I needed to focus on my inner life.

You know what you need to focus on. Write it down and then we can set our goals accordingly.

Phase 2: Set Goals (1 hour)

You're setting a maximum of 3 goals,1 is a priority, the other 2 are nice to have.

1 Priority Goal: At the end of the day this is the only one that really matters. It should be life-changing if you actually achieve it. In Q1 2024 when I had first started my new business, here was mine:

Write it in the present tense and ensure that it is SMART,specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. If you can't objectively declare whether you achieved it on day 90, it's not specific enough.

2 Supporting Goals (optional): These are optional because you should not be distracted from your priority goal. Instead these supporting goals should serve to help you achieve your priority goal.

Since my priority was business revenue, a supporting goal of eating well and working out 4 days a week supported mental clarity and energy. But it was not the point of the 90 days. That distinction matters,supporting goals don't get the same intensity, the same calendar space, or the same mental bandwidth as the priority.

After you've determined your 1 to 3 90-day SMART goals, define the following for each goal:

Lagging metric: How you'll objectively declare success. Not "made more money" but "closed 5 new clients." Not "got ripped" but "bodyfat at 15%."

Celebration: A predetermined reward aligned with the goal. Mine was a FreedUp celebration dinner,steak & cocktails at best restaurant in town. This matters more than you think. Your brain needs something on the other side.

Leading metric: What will you measure along the way to know if your commitments are effective?

Commitments: Covered in Phase 3

Plan of attack: How will you orchestrate your commitments together in a cohesive way? What routines or habits might you be able to establish that make your commitments easy?

Here's an example of what this could look like, for each goal:

Phase 3: Build Your Scorecard (30 minutes)

This is where the system gets its name. The commitments are the ACTION in 90 Days of Action.

Define commitments. These are insanely specific inputs you control. Not wishes,binary, scoreable actions. Every day, you can answer yes or no.

Defining Daily/Weekly Commitments for Each Goal

This is the most powerful part. You're taking a massive goal and breaking it down into what you need to do today, and consistently every day for the next 90 days, to actually get there.

Each commitment for each goal should be small enough to be achievable in a single day but effective enough to get you where you need to be by the end of 90 days.

Before we walk through how to set commitments, let me give you a few examples of commitments for different goals:

Goal 1: Lose 15 Pounds

• Commitment 1: Eat and track 1,800 cals/day
• Commitment 2: Eat 180g of protein/day
• Commitment 3: Lift 4 days/wk

Goal 2: Get Business to $1M ARR

• Commitment 1: Post to LinkedIn, daily
• Commitment 2: Send 30 DMs/week
• Commitment 3: Spend 10 hours/wk on follow-ups

Goal 3: Decrease my anxiety

• Commitment 1: Do a counseling session 2 times/month
• Commitment 2: Phone down from 5:30pm to 7am
• Commitment 3: Do a daily 15-minute walk with no headphones

What Makes a Good Commitment

1. It's input focused, not outcome focused. Note that for Goal 2, I didn't say "get 10 sales calls a week." That's a "lagging indicator", not a commitment. I can control if I send 30 DMs, but I cannot control if those DMs lead to 10 sales calls.
2. I can convert the commitment into a score. Every commitment should be binary,yes or no, did I do it or didn't I. "Eat healthy" can't be scored. "Eat and track 1,800 cals/day" can. If you can't put a checkmark next to it at the end of the day, rewrite it.
3. It's specific enough that I can't rationalize my way out of it. "Work out more" lets you count a walk around the block. "Lift 4 days/wk" doesn't. The specificity removes the negotiation with yourself. You want commitments where future-you can't lawyer present-you out of doing the work.
4. It survives a bad day. If keeping the commitment requires peak motivation, peak energy, and a perfect schedule, it's not a commitment,it's an aspiration. "Do a daily 15-minute walk with no headphones" survives a sick day, a travel day, a day where everything goes wrong. "Run 5 miles every morning at 5am" doesn't. Design for your worst Tuesday, not your best Monday.
5. It's daily or weekly,not vague. Every commitment needs a cadence. "Post to LinkedIn, daily." "Lift 4 days/wk." "Counseling 2 times/month." The cadence is what makes it trackable on a scorecard. If there's no frequency, it's a goal disguised as a commitment.
6. 3 to 5 per goal, max. More than that and you'll either stop tracking or water down your focus. If you have 15 commitments across 3 goals, you're back to the same problem,doing everything and doing nothing well. Pick the inputs that have the highest chance of moving the needle and cut the rest.

Build the Scorecard

Here's what this looks like as a one-week scorecard (repeat this table 13 times to cover ~90 days).

You can build this scorecard in Google Sheets, use an app for tracking like Strides, or build something in Notion or even a plain piece of paper.

Phase 4: Execute for 90 Days

Setup is over. Now you run it.

Daily: Every day, check off your commitments. Yes or no. Did I do it or didn't I. That's the whole thing,5 minutes, either before bed or first thing in the morning.

Weekly (30 minutes). Review two things:

1. Inputs,Am I keeping my commitments? If not, why? Is it a discipline problem or a design problem? Maybe the commitment is too ambitious for this season. Maybe you scheduled gym at 5am but you have a newborn. That's not a character flaw,redesign the input.
2. Outcomes,Are the commitments producing results? Check your leading metrics. If you're hitting inputs but outcomes aren't moving, the inputs are wrong. Change them.

This weekly loop is everything. Most goal-setting is "set and forget." You write goals in January and check in December. 90 Days of Action is a real-time operating system.

Action produces data. Data produces direction. Failure isn't the enemy,failure without a feedback loop is. Failure WITH a feedback loop is just data.

On Accountability

In the cohort version, participants post daily scorecards in Slack and someone hunts them down if they don't.

Solo, find one person,a friend or cofounder,and text them your scorecard daily. If you can't find anyone, the daily tracking alone still works. The scorecard is the accountability.

Why 90 days?

A year is too long,you lose urgency if you think you have twelve months to do something. But a month is too short,not enough time for something meaningful to compound.

Ninety days is long enough for life-changing results and short enough to maintain intensity. And when the quarter ends, you get a clean reset. New theme. New goals. New scorecard. Same system.

Cast massive vision. Enjoy the process. Be diligent and faithful today. And let the compounding do its thing.

If you run this, I want to hear about it. Reply and tell me what your theme is for the next quarter.