Sixty-one hours of building across twelve weeks. Not a hundred and eighty — sixty-one. Set your start date and where you're actually starting from, and this becomes a dated plan you can print and put on a wall.
The full plan, the milestones, and the two weeks that break people are all on this page. No email needed for any of it.
61
Build hours
12
Weeks
5.1
Avg hrs/week
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Run mode by
The load isn't flat
Total hours per week, build plus the machines already running. Watch the shape, not the total.
It climbs to a peak in weeks 8–9, then falls off sharply as the machines start running themselves. That shape is why week 6 and weeks 8–9 fail for completely different reasons.
Your twelve weeks
Click a week to strike it through as you go. Nothing is saved — this is a wall chart, not an app.
The two hard weeks, and they're not the same week
Confusing them is why people quit. They arrive separately and need opposite responses.
6
Week 6 is the morale trough
Moderate hours — less than weeks 8 and 9. But you've built a product nobody has bought and a chain that hasn't published, and the number you're trying to move hasn't moved. Nothing is wrong; this is what the middle of a build looks like from inside. Plan a smaller week 6 and get through it. Week 7 is when the clip chain starts publishing and the feeling changes.
8
Weeks 8–9 are the workload peak
Genuinely the highest hours of the quarter, because you're building the two heaviest chapters while running four machines. The fix is the buffer — three banked recording sessions mean you can skip recording entirely for a fortnight. If something has to give, give up the Saturday build block. Never the recording buffer or the approval gate.
If you fall behind
1
Extend the timeline, never the scope
A hundred and twenty days with five finished machines beats ninety days with five at sixty percent.
2
Never skip forward
If week eight is going badly, don't start Chapter 9 because it's shorter. The order exists because each machine needs the previous one to have something to work with.
3
Protect these three, in this order
The recording block, the approval gate, the weekly review. Everything else can slip a fortnight without damage.
The tracker version
This page prints. The tracker does the part a printout can't — remembers where you are, and tells you when a gate fails.
The Airtable sprint tracker — every milestone as a record, with the three time audits scheduled at weeks 4, 8 and 12
The weekly checklist for each of the twelve weeks, pre-loaded
The four-bucket time audit template so week 1 takes ten minutes instead of an hour
A wall-chart PDF at A3, if you'd rather not print a web page
It's an Airtable base and a PDF — neither pastes into a web page, so tell me where to send them.
One email a week about building things that run without you. Unsubscribe link at the bottom of every one, and it works.
✓
Sent.
Put week 1 in your calendar before you close this tab. The audit is passive — it costs you no hours you weren't already spending.