Ask three people on your team what they’re working on the second week of November.
You’ll get three different answers. Each one of them is correct.
That’s the problem. Not that any of them is wrong — it’s that none of them knows about the other two. And neither did you, until just now.
That’s the actual Q4 problem. Not that Fall is busy. Fall is always busy. The problem is that your Q4 is already fully scheduled, and nobody has looked at it in one place.
The GSD lens: The hour in August that saves your November.
Do this: the Q4 Collision Map
One hour, one page.
1. Commitment — every single thing committed to between now and December 31. Conferences, program launches, board meetings, grant reports, year-end campaigns, renewals, audits, holiday coverage. If someone somewhere expects it, it goes on the list.
2. Date — when it actually lands.
3. Prep window — the column that matters. Not the event date. The two to three weeks before where the actual work happens. Write the range, not the day.
4. Dies without — the one person this fails without. Not the team. The person.
Now mark every week where two or more prep windows overlap. That’s where your Q4 breaks.
And if the same name shows up in column four across two overlapping windows, that’s not a busy week. That’s a single point of failure with a date attached.
Then pick your worst week and move exactly one thing. Three ways to do it:
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- Move the date. Many “fixed” dates are fixed by habit. Ask. You’d be surprised what moves two weeks when somebody actually asks in August.
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- Move the person. Hand off the prep, not the event. The prep is where the hours are, and it’s the part that’s teachable.
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- Cut the scope. There’s almost always a version of the thing that takes one week instead of three. In a collision week, that’s the right version.
You don’t have to fix the whole map today. One thing moved in August beats five heroic recoveries in November.
What this costs
A collision found in August costs you an hour.
The same collision found in November costs overtime, a blown deadline, or a client who quietly decides not to renew. And that last one doesn’t show up on your P&L until Q1 — when you’re staring at a thin pipeline trying to work out what happened in a quarter you thought went fine.
Run the ratio yourself: one hour of your time in August, against one year of your smallest recurring contract. It isn’t close, and I don’t have to know your numbers to know that.
Before you close this
I built the Collision Map as a one-page template —the four columns, plus the overlap math already set up. Make a copy of it here and try it out for yourself.
And when you fill it in, if three things are stacked on the same week, tell me which week. I read every reply — I’m curious whether it’s November for everybody or just for me.
P.S. — The reason your Q4 lives in six different places instead of one is mostly a story about how work got distributed over the last five years. That’s what I talk about in Episode 2 of Werk Reimagined, about four minutes.
– Georgie-Ann
GSD Solutions helps SMBs, nonprofits, and agencies audit, automate, and integrate the systems they outgrew. If you want a second set of eyes on yours, that’s what the 90-minute evaluation is for — gsdsolutionsinc.com/letstalk
