How to Run Your Quarterly Planning Cycle in Beyond Time

Most quarterly planning tools are built for one thing: storing the plan. They produce a well-formatted document that captures your objectives and key results with nowhere to go after the planning session ends.

Beyond Time is designed around the insight that a quarterly plan is only as valuable as the weekly execution habits that sustain it. The tool’s quarterly workflow connects the planning session directly to the weekly review cycle—so the plan doesn’t end up as a document you reference twice per quarter.

This walkthrough covers the full quarterly cycle in Beyond Time: the retrospective, the planning session, the weekly review, and the mid-quarter check-in.

Before You Begin: What You Need

You need approximately 90 minutes for the initial quarterly setup—30 minutes for the retrospective and 60 minutes for planning. Subsequent quarters are typically faster once you have built the template structure.

If you are using Beyond Time for the first time this quarter, start by importing your prior quarter’s work log or calendar. The retrospective module uses this data to generate an initial pattern analysis that reduces the manual effort of reviewing the last 13 weeks.

Phase 1: The Retrospective (30 Minutes)

Open the Quarterly Review module and select “Start New Quarter Review.” Beyond Time will prompt you through five structured questions:

1. What objectives did you complete? You can link to prior quarter objectives if they were tracked in Beyond Time, or type them manually. Mark each as Complete, Partial, or Incomplete.

2. What was your average weekly execution rate? If you tracked tasks in Beyond Time last quarter, the tool calculates this automatically from your task completion data. If not, estimate it: roughly what percentage of your intended weekly work did you actually complete?

3. What were the biggest unexpected time demands? These are the things that consumed capacity that was not in the plan. Name two or three. This feeds the capacity budget for the new quarter.

4. What did you learn about your priorities? One sentence per objective: was the objective as important as you thought, more important, or less?

5. What will you do differently next quarter? This question is optional but often produces the most useful output. Write one structural change, not a behavioral resolution.

Beyond Time stores the retrospective and surfaces it at the end of the following quarter as historical context.

Phase 2: Setting Quarterly Objectives (30 Minutes)

After the retrospective, Beyond Time prompts you to the Objectives module.

Step 1: Write your destination statement. A text field prompts you for a three-to-five sentence narrative of what a successful quarter looks like. The field has a character limit that enforces brevity—this is intentional. Vague, sprawling destination statements produce vague objectives.

Step 2: Add your objectives. Beyond Time supports two formats:

OKR format: Enter a qualitative Objective, then two to four Key Results with numerical targets. The dashboard tracks Key Result progress automatically as you log related tasks.

Milestone format: Enter an objective, then a sequence of weekly milestones. This is better suited to project-based work where the primary uncertainty is execution rather than metric targeting.

You can mix formats across objectives. A revenue objective might use Key Results (a number to hit). A product development objective might use milestones (a sequence of deliverables).

Step 3: Set the priority ranking. Drag objectives into priority order. Beyond Time uses this ranking in the weekly review prompts—higher-priority objectives are surfaced first.

Step 4: Build the capacity budget. Enter your estimated available hours per week for planned work, after meetings and administration. Beyond Time calculates whether your objectives are feasible given that capacity estimate and flags objectives at risk of being crowded out.

This step generates the most uncomfortable conversations—and the most useful ones. If the tool shows that your three objectives require 30 hours of weekly focused work and your capacity budget is 18 hours, the issue needs to be resolved before the quarter begins.

Phase 3: Milestones and Calendar Integration (20 Minutes)

For each objective, Beyond Time’s AI assistant can suggest a 13-week milestone sequence based on the objective type. This is a starting point, not a final plan—review and edit each milestone before accepting.

Once milestones are finalized, sync them to your calendar as time blocks. Beyond Time integrates directly with Google Calendar; milestones appear as event placeholders that you can accept, reject, or reschedule.

The calendar sync is the mechanism that transforms the plan from a document into a schedule. An objective milestone that exists only in a planning tool is easy to defer. One that occupies a specific Tuesday afternoon is harder to ignore.

Phase 4: The Weekly Review Habit (15 Minutes per Week)

Every Monday morning, Beyond Time prompts a weekly review. The prompt is structured:

1. Score last week. How many of your planned actions did you complete? Beyond Time pre-populates based on task data; you confirm or adjust.
2. Set this week’s actions. Three to five specific tasks, each linked to a quarterly objective.
3. Name one blocker. The biggest thing likely to impede this week’s planned work.

The weekly scorecard is visible on the main dashboard throughout the week, which creates a low-friction reminder that the quarterly plan is a live commitment rather than a historical document.

Beyond Time tracks your weekly execution rate across the quarter and alerts you if your rate drops below 65% for two consecutive weeks—the threshold at which quarterly objectives are statistically at risk based on the 12 Week Year’s research.

Phase 5: The Mid-Quarter Check-In (Week 6–7)

Beyond Time flags week seven with a mid-quarter review prompt. The prompt surfaces:

• Current execution rate versus the 85% target
• Progress on each Key Result or milestone
• Capacity utilization versus the original budget

For each objective, you make one of three decisions: Persist (on track, continue), Adjust (still the right objective but scope or timeline needs revision), or Deprioritize (capacity is needed elsewhere). Beyond Time records these decisions as a log—so the end-of-quarter retrospective has a record of what was intentionally changed versus what drifted.

What the Full Cycle Looks Like in Practice

A quarter run through Beyond Time produces five artifacts:

1. A retrospective record with pattern analysis from the prior quarter
2. A destination statement and two to four objectives with Key Results or milestones
3. A capacity budget showing available hours versus required effort
4. A weekly execution log showing completion rates across all 13 weeks
5. A mid-quarter decision log showing explicit persist/adjust/deprioritize calls

By the end of the quarter, you have not just a scoring document but a full account of how the quarter actually went—what was planned, what was executed, and what decisions were made along the way. This record makes the next quarter’s retrospective dramatically easier and more useful.

Start your next quarter by opening Beyond Time’s Quarterly Review module and completing the retrospective for the current quarter—even if it’s only week eight. The pattern analysis alone is worth 30 minutes.

Related:

• The Complete Guide to Quarterly Planning Frameworks
• How to Do Quarterly Planning
• 5 AI Prompts for Quarterly Planning
• Team Runs Quarterly Planning: A Case Study

Tags: Beyond Time, quarterly planning, OKRs, weekly review, planning tools