October 2, 2026
Hi Everyone,
For almost ten years, Malte Krame, founder and CEO of the marketing platform Luxury Presence, has started every quarter the same way.
One uninterrupted hour, phone off, one sheet of paper, writing down what matters for the next 90 days. He runs a company of 600 people, and he credits this single hour with keeping him steady through a decade of doing it.
Today we're walking you through a one-hour exercise that sets your direction for the next 90 days. It works the same whether you're planning for a business, a department, or a team of four.
The best morning for it
Q4's first Monday is October 5. Behavioral scientist Katherine Milkman found that gym visits rise 33% at the start of a new week, with similar jumps after a new month or a new year. She called the pattern the fresh-start effect. People find it easier to begin something on a date that feels like a beginning.
Kramer writes his plan before he's "tired, reactive or overwhelmed," and the first days of a quarter are when that's still possible.
How to spend the hour
Block the hour for Monday morning, or the earliest free slot that week. Open and copy the quarterly reset template we built for you, and work through these five steps:
Look back (10 minutes): Write three sentences about last quarter: what made a real difference, what you meant to do but didn't because urgent work came first, and what you kept doing only out of habit.
Choose three priorities (20 minutes): List everything you could work on next quarter. Company goals if you run the company, your own and your team's if you run a function. Then circle three, and write what finished looks like for each by the last week of December.
Write your stop-doing list (10 minutes): Jim Collins found that the leaders of the best-performing companies in his research used stop-doing lists as much as to-do lists. Take two or three of the things you kept doing only out of habit and write that you won't continue them in the new quarter.
Write one filter sentence (10 minutes): New requests will start arriving in week one. Write the sentence you'll read before saying yes to any of them: "Does this help one of my three priorities?"
Schedule the reread (5 minutes). Add a 15-minute appointment every other Monday to open the page and compare your three priorities and your stop-doing list with what you actually did.
If you only have fifteen minutes
If a full hour won't happen on Monday, choose your three priorities and write the stop-doing list. Then add the reread appointment before you close the page.
Here's the one-page template with all five steps. Copy it now, and it's ready before Monday.
Go Deeper
👉 Entrepreneur: This 60-Minute Founder Ritual Prevented Me From Burning Out — read this before you run the exercise; Kramer shares the exact questions he writes down every quarter.
👉 Wharton: The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior — this covers how managers can time reminders and kickoffs to fresh starts so the effect works for the whole team.
👉 Lenny's Newsletter: Shreyas Doshi on pre-mortems, the LNO framework, and ROI vs. opportunity cost — listen to the opportunity-cost section before you choose your three priorities; it will make you stricter about which ones you circle.
Coming up on Monday
Microsoft found that new hires who met their buddy more than eight times felt productive far faster than those who met once. On Monday, we'll show you how to make those meetings happen.
Have a great weekend!
P.S. That extra Monday motivation to start fresh and plan the quarter fades within days — the researchers measured the fade too. Use it to write your plan. From then on, the appointment every other Monday is what gets it reopened, long after the feeling is gone.