The 10-Week Sprint: What CEOs Should Finish, Cut and Start in Q4

Picture a chief operating officer in Denver on a Monday morning in mid-October. The 2026 plan on her second monitor still lists 14 priorities. Her calendar holds more recurring meetings than she can name, and the first 2027 budget review is on Thursday.

She knows the year is not over. She also knows that whatever she does not finish, cut or decide in the next ten weeks will roll straight into January, wearing a new label.

That tension is the whole fourth quarter for most leadership teams. Here is how to turn it into a sprint instead of a slide.

How many working weeks are left in 2026?

Counting from Monday, Oct. 19, there are ten work weeks before Christmas Day, which falls on Friday, Dec. 25, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s federal holiday calendar. Thanksgiving lands on Thursday, Nov. 26, in week six.

Two of those ten weeks are short, and the last one is mostly out-of-office replies. So the honest number of full-focus weeks is closer to eight.

That is the first reason to treat the quarter as a sprint. A sprint has a fixed end, a short list of goals and a clear rule for what gets dropped. A “strong finish” has none of those things.

Our COO in Denver does not need more ambition for the quarter. She needs a smaller list and a calendar that can hold it.

Why do year-end plans stall?

The gap between a plan and its results is old and well measured. In a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, Bain’s Michael Mankins and Richard Steele reported that most companies’ strategies deliver only 63% of their promised financial value.

Their fixes read like a Q4 checklist. Keep the strategy simple and concrete. Make priorities explicit. Discuss resources early. Monitor performance against the plan and reallocate when results drift.

Most stalled plans fail on the second and third points. Fourteen priorities means no priorities, and resources stay where they were in January because nobody forced the question.

The fourth quarter is when that drift becomes visible. It is also the last window to fix it before the same pattern is copied into next year’s plan.

What should executives finish before the year ends?

Start by sorting every open initiative into one of three buckets. Be blunt, because the sorting is the work.

Bucket	Test	What happens by Dec. 18
Finish	Can it ship, close or reach a decision point in eight weeks, and does it matter to 2026 results?	Named owner, weekly check, done or decided
Park	Still worth doing, but cannot finish this year without starving a Finish item	Written up and handed to 2027 planning
Kill	No longer tied to a current priority, or nobody would notice if it stopped	Stopped, with people and budget released

Aim for three Finish items at the company level, and no more than five. Typical candidates are a signed customer contract, a product release already in testing, a hire that unblocks a team, or a decision the board has been waiting on.

Each Finish item gets one owner, not a committee. It also gets a definition of done that a stranger could check. “Improve onboarding” fails that test. “New onboarding flow live for all customers by Dec. 11” passes.

How do you keep Finish items on track?

Hold one short weekly review, at the same time every week, covering only the Finish items. Each owner answers three questions: what moved, what is blocked and what decision is needed from the room.

Blocked items get a decision in that meeting, not a follow-up meeting. If a Finish item slips two weeks in a row, the team either cuts its scope or moves it to Park. Both are fine. Letting it drift is not.

New requests will arrive. A board member wants a deck, a large customer wants a custom feature. Run each one through the same test as everything else, and if it earns a Finish slot, name what leaves the list to make room.

The Park list matters as much as the Finish list. Writing parked work down, with its current status and what it would need, keeps it from vanishing and keeps it from sneaking back into this quarter.

What should you cut in Q4?

The fastest cut is usually the calendar. Shopify offers a well-documented example.

In January 2023, Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian told employees that recurring meetings with three or more people were being removed from calendars, and that Wednesdays would be kept free of meetings, Fox Business reported. Staff were asked to wait at least two weeks before adding anything back, and then to be “really, really critical” about what returned.

The company first estimated the purge would clear about 76,500 hours. About a month later, Nejatian told NPR that Shopify had deleted 322,000 hours of meetings, by the company’s own count.

The lesson is not that every company should copy Shopify’s rules. It is the method: remove by default, then make each meeting earn its way back.

The pressure on calendars has not eased since. Microsoft’s June 2025 Work Trend Index report found that among the most-pinged 20% of Microsoft 365 users, people were interrupted every two minutes during core hours, about 275 times a day. The same report found meetings after 8 p.m. were up 16% year over year, and 57% of meetings were ad hoc calls without a calendar invite.

For a ten-week sprint, three cuts tend to pay off quickly:

• Recurring meetings. Cancel every standing meeting you own for two weeks. Restore only the ones whose absence caused a real problem.
• Zombie projects. Anything in the Kill bucket stops this week, with a short note to the team on why.
• Auto-renewing commitments. Many vendor contracts renew at year end. Review the ones tied to work you are cutting, and read the terms closely on any AI tools, using our guide to nine provisions executives should read twice in an AI vendor contract.

How should you set up 2027 budgets and priorities now?

Most 2027 budgets will look a lot like 2026 budgets. That is the default, and the data shows it is costly.

In a McKinsey Quarterly study of more than 1,600 U.S. companies from 1990 to 2005, Stephen Hall, Dan Lovallo and Reinier Musters found that for one-third of businesses, the capital received in a given year was almost exactly what they received the year before. The mean year-to-year correlation across industries was 0.92.

The companies that moved money did better. The top third shifted an average of 56% of capital across business units over the 15 years and earned, on average, 30% higher annual total returns to shareholders than the bottom third.

That is a case for using the fourth quarter to decide, not just to forecast. Three moves help.

1. Start from the Kill list. Every dollar and hour released this quarter is the first funding source for 2027 priorities.
2. Cap the priority list. Pick three to five company priorities, each with an owner and a measure. Everything else is a team-level goal.
3. Write forecasts as ranges. A one-page outlook with probabilities and clear actions, like the format in our piece on front-page forecasts for faster executive decisions, makes it easier to change course in March instead of waiting for December.

Budget meetings also reward a habit of deciding well rather than deciding loudly. Our recent column on why leaders should optimize for great decisions rather than revenue alone makes the same point through the eyes of a manufacturing CEO.

What does a 10-week Q4 operating plan look like?

Here is a simple week-by-week shape. Adjust the dates to your fiscal year.

• Week 1 (Oct. 19): Sort every initiative into Finish, Park or Kill. Announce the three to five Finish items and their owners.
• Week 2 (Oct. 26): Run the two-week calendar reset. Stop everything on the Kill list.
• Weeks 3 to 5 (Nov. 2 to Nov. 20): Execute. Hold one 30-minute weekly review of Finish items, and nothing else at the leadership level.
• Week 6 (Nov. 23): Short week. Use it for the first full draft of 2027 priorities, built from the Park list and released resources.
• Weeks 7 and 8 (Nov. 30 to Dec. 11): Close Finish items. Finalize 2027 budgets, with any money that moved written down and explained.
• Week 9 (Dec. 14): Publish the 2027 plan on one page. Name owners and the first 30-day milestones.
• Week 10 (Dec. 21): Light week. Send a thank-you note that names what got done and what got cut.

The schedule is not the point. The point is that every week has a job, and the leadership team can see whether it got done.

What should leaders tell their teams about the sprint?

Say it plainly and early. People can handle a shorter list. What wears them down is a long list that never shrinks.

Explain what is being finished, what is parked and what is stopping. Then protect the people working on Finish items from new requests until December.

Back in Denver, the COO’s plan now fits on a single page. Three Finish items carry names next to them. Nine are parked for January with notes, and two are gone. Her Thursday budget review starts with the money those two projects released, which is the first time all year the plan and the calendar have agreed.

Frequently asked questions

When should annual planning for 2027 start?

Many companies begin budget and priority work in the fall so decisions are final before the December holidays. A practical rule is to have a draft of next year's priorities by Thanksgiving week and a final one-page plan by mid-December. Starting earlier matters less than deciding, rather than copying last year's plan forward.

How many priorities should a company have for the year?

Research on strategy execution, including Mankins and Steele's work in Harvard Business Review, stresses keeping strategy simple and making priorities explicit. Many leadership teams settle on three to five company-level priorities, each with one owner and one measure. Anything beyond that usually becomes a team-level goal.

What is the difference between a Q4 plan and an annual plan?

An annual plan sets direction, budgets and priorities for the full year. A Q4 operating plan is shorter and tactical: it decides which current work gets finished, parked or stopped in the remaining weeks, and frees time and money that the annual plan can then use.

Should we cancel all recurring meetings like Shopify did?

Not necessarily. Shopify's approach worked as a reset: remove recurring meetings by default, wait two weeks, then restore only what proves necessary. A smaller version, such as each leader pausing the meetings they own for two weeks, tests the same idea with less disruption.

How do you decide which projects to kill?

Ask whether the project is still tied to a current priority, whether anyone would notice if it stopped, and whether it can deliver value in a reasonable time. Projects that fail those tests are candidates to stop. Write down the reason and release the people and budget so they can be used elsewhere.

Sources

• U.S. Office of Personnel Management: Federal Holidays
• Bain & Company (Harvard Business Review): Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance
• Fox Business: E-commerce giant cancels 76,500 hours of meetings in new year
• OPB/NPR: Shopify deleted 322,000 hours of meetings. Should the rest of us be jealous?
• Microsoft WorkLab: Breaking down the infinite workday
• McKinsey Quarterly: How to put your money where your strategy is