The 85% Rule
The 85% rule is The 12 Week Year's execution benchmark: complete at least 85% of your planned weekly tactics and your goals become highly likely, even without perfection. It reframes success around consistency rather than intensity — a sustained 85% beats alternating weeks of 100% and 40%, and it builds in slack for real life.
The number does two jobs. First, it sets a bar low enough to be humane — 85% of a well-built tactic list survives a sick child, a travel week, a bad Tuesday — and high enough that hitting it most weeks means the plan's inputs are genuinely happening. Second, it converts the scorecard from a pass/fail exam into an instrument with a green zone: at or above 85%, trust the plan; below it, investigate.
The investigation is the useful part. A week at 60% has one of two causes: an execution problem (the tactics were right, the week got away from you) or a planning problem (the tactic list was never realistic). Chasing 100% hides this distinction because it punishes both equally; the 85% threshold makes the question askable without shame.
In practice: a scorecard reading 92, 88, 76, 91 is a healthy quarter with one week worth a note in the weekly review. A scorecard reading 100, 100, 45, 30 is a plan collapsing under its own perfectionism. The rule's real content is that goals are achieved by the boring accumulation of mostly-good weeks.
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