Rocks (Quarterly Priorities)

Rocks are the three to seven most important things your company or a person commits to finishing in the next 90 days. The name comes from the jar analogy: put the big rocks in first and the sand and water (the daily noise) settle around them, but fill the jar with sand first and the rocks never go in. Rocks are your big rocks, the priorities that actually move the business, set quarterly so they're near enough to feel urgent but far enough to finish something real.

For a lean founder, Rocks are the antidote to a permanently full plate that never advances the things that matter. Everything urgent will always fight for your day; Rocks force you to name what must be done this quarter and protect time for it. Each Rock has one owner and a clear done-or-not-done definition, so there's no fuzzy 80%.

In practice this means writing each Rock down somewhere it can't be ignored. Say you run product and engineering on Linear: you'd create a project per Rock, name a single owner, and break it into the issues that prove it's finished, so progress is visible without a status meeting. Say your Rocks are personal or admin rather than shippable work; you might keep them as a small pinned set of tasks in Todoist and review them every Monday. And because a Rock needs a measurable done-test, say one Rock is "cut signup-to-activation time in half", you'd wire that metric onto a board in Databox so the number, not a hunch, tells you whether the Rock landed. Reviewing progress weekly keeps a 90-day goal from quietly slipping until the quarter is gone. Fewer, finished Rocks beat a long list of half-built ones.