The Weekly Scorecard

One formula, strictly applied

The score is deliberately primitive: completed ÷ planned. Count every tactic instance that was due this week — a five-times-weekly tactic contributes five instances, a weekly tactic one — count how many you actually completed, and divide. No weighting, no partial credit, no adjustment for how hard the week was.

The primitiveness is the point. Any sophistication you add becomes a negotiation surface, and the scorecard's value depends on being non-negotiable. A tactic that was 90% done is not done. Work you did instead of the plan doesn't count, however valuable — the score measures fidelity to the plan, and unplanned wins are a planning insight for next week, not scorecard credit.

A worked example

Take the sales plan from the 12-week plan template. This week's planned instances: outreach touches (daily, Mon–Fri — 5 instances), ship one improvement (1), hold three discovery calls (1), publish one article (1), weekly review (1), score the week (1). Total planned: 10.

Suppose you hit outreach four days out of five, shipped, held the calls, skipped the article, and did both review items. Completed: 4 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 1 = 8. Score: 8 ÷ 10 = 80%. Notice what the number does: it doesn't say the week was bad — it says exactly which lead measures slipped (one outreach day, the article) and hands you Monday's adjustment for free.

• Planned this week: 10 tactic instances across two goals.
• Completed: 8 (missed one outreach day and the weekly article).
• Weekly execution score: 8 ÷ 10 = 80%.
• Action: article slipped twice running — move writing to a protected Tuesday block.

The scoring ritual

Scoring works when it's a ritual, not a chore you remember sometimes. Fix a time — Friday afternoon or Sunday evening are the common choices — and keep the liturgy short: mark each tactic instance done or missed, compute the score, write one line about what blocked each miss, and set next week's plan while the misses are fresh. Ten minutes, every week, including the terrible weeks.

Especially the terrible weeks. A skipped scoring session is how the system dies — chapter 13 ranks it among the deadliest failure modes — because an unmeasured week licenses an unmeasured month. A 40% honestly recorded keeps the system alive; a blank week starts the abandonment cascade.

Why score execution instead of results

Week to week, results are a bad report card. Lag measures move noisily and respond to work done weeks earlier, so judging a week by its results punishes good process during slow stretches and rewards coasting during harvest stretches. Execution, by contrast, is fully yours: the score is a clean reading of the one variable you control.

Scored weekly, execution also becomes predictive. A run of 85%+ weeks tells you the lag measure is being manufactured on schedule; a slide into the 60s predicts a missed quarter with weeks left to intervene. What the specific thresholds mean — and what to do at each level — is the subject of the next chapter.