Step 2.5: Keep the Score
Mar 06, 2025
Better Work" Series: (4 of 5)
Before we jump to the last pillar of better work, strategic conversations, I'm going to drill down on one of the core 4 events that is maybe the single greatest practice I've adopted over the years, the 90-Day Score.
First a story...
Once upon a time in the early 2000s, Domino’s was a joke. Their pizza was consistently ranked worst in the industry, and they were bleeding customers. Their goal? “Make better pizza and sell more of it.” But that wasn’t enough.
Instead of just setting a goal, they measured everything:
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Customer complaints were logged in real time.
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Delivery times were tracked to the second.
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Every store was rated based on speed, quality, and customer feedback.
Armed with real-time data, they made bold changes—redesigning their recipe, cutting inefficiencies, and rolling out a 30-minute guarantee. The result? Within a decade, their stock price skyrocketed over 3,000%, making them one of the most successful restaurant turnarounds in history.
Setting goals is fun—following through is difficult, frustrating, and uncomfortable. And that’s what makes a score so valuable. It forces clarity, eliminates distractions, and wrestles with reality. No fluff. No extra noise. No excuses. Just performance-driven execution.
Graduate From Goals
A goal without a tracking mechanism is just a wish. Or worse—a bedtime story you tell yourself to sleep at night only to wake up stressed out at 2 AM after a bad work dream where your teeth are falling out. Hypothetically.
A score, on the other hand, is brutal in the best way: it confirms or denies whether you're actually making progress, if your assumptions were right or wrong, and if your plan nailed or fell short. A score forces us to break our big, vague ambitions into measurable, performance-driven actions.
Example:
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A goal feels like: Increase sales leads.
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A score feels like: Generate 30 new leads, schedule 10 strategy calls, close 5 deals by the end of the month.
You can see the difference. One sounds nice. The other makes it very clear what success looks like and produces some real accountability.
Three Categories of the 90-Day Score
The 90-Day Score operates on three essential components that bridge our business aspirations into high-performance game plans:
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Milestones – What are the 1-3 significant milestones you need to achieve in the next 90 days that move you closer to your larger objectives?
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Score – What are the top 3-5 measurable results that prove you’ve reached those milestones?
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Game Plan – What are the 3-5 actions required to achieve those results?
After you have that mapped out, you apply the x-factor step... Schedule every stinking game plan item on your calendar. Without this step, you’ve just done a craft exercise with your brain, and all that energy was for nothing. Hooray.
When you proactively organize your planning in this way and bake it’s results right into your calendar, you no longer wake up asking, What should I work on today? You wake up with a schedule that is telling you what you need to do in the direction you want to go.
How nice is that? I’m telling you, the stress relieving effect is real.
Why 90 Days?
There’s a reason elite businesses and athletes work in 90-day cycles—because shorter timeframes create focus and allow for better adaptability.
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Harvard Business Review (2018) found that companies using quarterly performance goals outperform those using annual ones because they can adapt faster to changes.
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The Zeigarnik Effect (Baumeister & Masicampo, 2011) shows that our brains retain and prioritize incomplete tasks—meaning shorter cycles help maintain momentum.
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A McKinsey & Co. study (2020) found that organizations using 90-day objectives increased productivity by 30% and wasted significantly less time on non-essential work.
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Research from the University of Scranton (2016) revealed that 92% of people fail to achieve long-term goals, but those who break them into short-term milestones are dramatically more successful.
Big-picture thinking is important, it sets our strategic direction. But big-picture objectives don’t drive performance. They just point us in the right direction. Execution happens in tight, focused cycles (90 days).
This practice is so important I made a 90 Day Score Builder for you. Literally if you were to ask me one thing to introduce into your business to create better work and sustain high-performance, it would be this.
If you need some relief and support on your prioritization and task management, and would like to be confident you’re working in the right direction, do yourself a favor and go build yourself a 90 day score.