<aside> 🧮 Duplicate and use our planning spreadsheet to simplify your personal quarterly planning.

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This is meant to be a general framework for considering what’s achievable in a quarter. You’ll have to plug in your own numbers with knowledge about how long your tasks take you.

Tips and tricks

• It can be difficult to achieve goals that have external dependencies.
• Keep goals at a high-level.
  • Don’t list all of your projects. Instead, list your primary areas of focus that projects can be grouped into.
    • For example, “Website updates for Kubecon” could be the top level goal category. After initial quarterly planning we would define the goal and break down the tasks like “updated homepage, updated navigation, new template for use-cases…” etc.

Doing the math

Estimate capacity based on people-hours per quarter, and work your way back from there. Always leave buffer space, and remember to account for time off. The smallest unit of work is considered half a day. Everything has overhead. Focus switching, spin-up time, wind-down time, communication, documentation, verification, and more. 1 point is an xs task, 2 points sm, 4 points med, 8 points lg, and 16 xl. Anything larger than 16 points xl (2 full weeks) should be broken down into smaller phases.

• Take into account how much of your week is administrative. There are always meetings, planning sessions, and unexpected occurrences.
  • This might be half of your week or more. In order to establish a baseline, review your calendar and Slack history from the past quarter.
• Try to leave 20% buffer room, typically at the end of the week. This is for tasks outside of our planned workload. Examples include emergency projects or small asks.
• 2 points per day, * 5 days per week, - 1 day per week of buffer, subtract half for administrative tasks = 4.
  • After administrative time and buffer time, we might have roughly 4 points of work per week per person.
• There are roughly 4 weeks in a month, and 3 months per quarter.
• We need to account for holidays and other time off.
• 4 points per week, ~ 4 weeks per month, 3 months per quarter.
• 4 * 4 * 3 = 48 points per quarter, MINUS any time off.
• Assuming 12 days PTO plus 12 calendar holidays per year, we would lose 6 days per quarter.
• 48 - (6 days * 2 points per day) =

36 points of capacity per person per quarter for tasks