Three Time Frames, One Business

You know that feeling when you’re jet-lagged?

Your body’s in one place, but your mind is in another.

You’re tired when you should be alert. Wired when you should be winding down.

You can’t think straight, and everything feels off.

That same feeling happens in your business (or life) when your vision, goals, and actions—all of which naturally exist in different time frames— are not aligned.

You’re dreaming big about the future but you lose focus on what’s important to achieve it while hustling through the chaos of today.

That’s internal jet lag and it’s one of the biggest reasons smart, capable people feel stuck.

When you sync them up, you feel energized and progress accelerates. When they’re out of sync you procrastinate, flounder and even your best efforts feel scrambled.

Our vision is the long term guide. Focus lies in our intermediate goals. Actions can only exist in the short term. Let’s define them as follows:

• 5-Year Vision - long term

• 1-Year Focus - intermediate

• 3-Month Plan - short term

Before they can align, they must be well defined which is what we’ll do below.

Note: This exercise is focused on business but it can be just as easily applied to any aspect of your life.

5-Year Vision

What It Is

The 5-year time frame isn’t for tasks. It’s for trajectory. It pulls you toward something greater. You don’t need to know every step, just the mountain you want to climb. It should feel slightly unbelievable.

Be careful of limiting beliefs. Don’t worry about how you’ll get there, the 5-Year Vision answers your “why”. In my own experiences, I have seen people stop themselves short here because they can’t see over the obstacles in front of them.

Most importantly, your vision should invoke feelings. Although there are “metrics” questions (how much revenue, etc.) in the prompts below, the outcomes of your vision should provide strong, positive feelings supporting your “why”.

Prompts to Define Your 5-Year Vision

• What would the ideal version of this business look like in 5 years?

• How much revenue/profit are you generating?

• What is your role in the business? Are you the operator, advisor, or owner?

• What kind of lifestyle does the business support (freedom, location, time)?

• What impact are you making on customers or your industry?

• If this business succeeded beyond your expectations, what would be true?

What It Might Look Like

Here is a 5-Year Vision statement for a hypothetical consumer financial app:

1-Year Focus

What It Is

Your 1-Year, intermediate time frame becomes less about feelings and more about focusing on tangible goals.

One year is long enough to make real progress and short enough to require trade-offs. This is where the vision starts to harden. It’s not a list of dreams but a decision about what to focus on to achieve your vision.

Here again, we include “metrics” questions in the prompts but mechanism matters more than metrics. What are the most important systems, products, people and processes that need to exist to bring your vision to reality?

Priority and trade offs are key. You can’t do everything and lack of focus is the most frequent destroyer of dreams.

Prompts to Define Your 1-Year Focus

• What would make this year a clear success?

• What financial targets do you want to hit (revenue, MRR, cash flow)?

• What systems, products, or people need to be in place by year’s end?

• What do you want to prove, learn, or validate this year?

• If you could only accomplish one big thing this year, what would it be?

• What would make you feel proud and energized one year from now?

• What’s the single biggest lever you can pull this year?

• What do you need to say “no” to, even if it’s good?

• If you could only accomplish one thing in the next 12 months, what would it be?

What It Might Look Like

Below is an example 1-Year Focus statement for the hypothetical consumer financial app:

3-Month Plan

What It Is

Quarterly cycles are where vision and focus meet reality. They’re long enough to make meaningful progress and short enough to create urgency and momentum.

The 3-Month Plan is where stuff gets done. It answers what actions, systems, and routines can I implement now to support my 1-Year Focus goals?

Prompts to Define Your 3-Month Plan

• What’s the highest-impact goal I can achieve in the next 3 months?

• What’s one measurable milestone I want to hit?

• What project or initiative do I need to start, finish, or validate?

• What distractions do I need to eliminate or postpone?

• What would make this quarter feel like real, forward progress?

• What can I do now that sets me up for a strong rest of the year?

• What bottlenecks or obstacles are you actively removing?

• What support, tools, or resources do you need to follow through?

What It Might Look Like

Below is an example 3-Month Plan statement for the hypothetical consumer financial app:

The Next Step

Don’t let this be simply a mental exercise. Put all three in writing.

Your 5-Year Vision can be as little as 3–5 sentences. No limits. No filters.

Choose one or two priorities for your 1-Year Plan.

Build your 3-Month Plan with specific actions to support both.

Reference them often as your playbook.

You can’t control time. Life happens. No plan survives reality completely intact.

But you can learn to move through it intentionally with your three time frames aligned.

And that changes everything.

My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future. 

Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.