The Science-Backed Power of 90-Day Sprints for Business Growth
Why Long-Term Goals Don’t Stick
Every January, millions of people set New Year’s resolutions. The gyms are packed, diets are strict and optimism is high.
But by February, most people have already slipped.
By March, almost no one is still on track.
Research shows that the vast majority of resolutions collapse within the first few weeks and fewer than 10% are ever kept throughout the year (University of Adelaide, 2024).
The Problem With Annual Goals
It’s not that the resolutions themselves are bad. The challenge is the timeframe. A year is too long for most people to stay motivated.
Priorities inevitably shift — just when we get focused on A, the demands of modern business force us to pivot to B. An annual plan simply isn’t agile enough for the way most of us work today.
We discount the future, we get distracted and even when we remain committed, we tend to overestimate what can be achieved in twelve months.
Conversely, we drastically underestimate what’s possible in a focused 90-day window.
Why Ninety Days Works
Ninety days is the unsung hero of stretch goals and exponential growth.
That’s why I’ve started running my marketing agency in 90-Day Growth Sprints™. Each Sprint sets one clear objective, defines 2–3 measurable results and drives to achieve them.
At the end of the cycle, we review, reset and start again — building momentum quarter by quarter until even the biggest goals become achievable.
The Psychology Behind Short Cycles
Psychological research helps explain why this works. Annual goals often fail because of temporal discounting — the tendency to undervalue future rewards while overestimating what’s realistic in the long term.
Studies in organisational psychology confirm that shorter, nearer-term goals drive higher effort and persistence (Steel & König, 2006; Latham & Seijts, 1999; Vancouver et al., 2001).
The Power of One Objective
Research also shows that performance drops sharply when teams juggle too many objectives. One specific, challenging goal consistently outperforms several vague or scattered ones (Locke & Latham, 2002; Seijts & Latham, 2005).
Growth Sprints enforce this discipline by focusing each quarter on one objective and just a handful of key results — creating the clarity that fuels progress.
The Compounding Effect of Iteration
Organisational studies add another layer: short, rhythmic planning cycles accelerate learning and adaptability.
The Carnegie Foundation’s Handbook on Improvement Science highlights the power of 90-day cycles for testing, iterating and refining in complex environments (Bryk et al., 2015).
Similar research in healthcare and quality improvement (Mohr & Batalden, 2002) confirms that repeated short cycles create faster knowledge transfer and stronger long-term performance than static annual plans.
How Constraint Creates Momentum
As Dr Benjamin Hardy writes in 10x Is Easier Than 2x: “When you constrain yourself to bigger goals, you drastically reduce your options. That constraint forces focus, which is what creates exponential growth.”
Growth Sprints give this principle a practical rhythm. Each quarter we constrain, focus, execute and then reset — unlocking compounding growth.
Flexibility Without Losing Focus
We also allocate space in each Sprint for ad hoc requests, enabling us to respond to seasonal opportunities or urgent needs.
These ad hoc requests are kept to less than 20% of the workload, while any larger projects that don’t fit the current cycle are deferred into the next — ensuring they still get the focus they deserve without diluting what matters most right now.
How Growth Becomes Sustainable
The result is a simple, science-backed operating system for growth: focused enough to achieve measurable results each quarter, structured enough to compound into your long-term vision and yet flexible enough to adapt to real-world opportunities along the way.
