Signal & ScienceAcademy

Course 4 · Lesson 3 of 7

Fit the plan to capacity and the growth model

Cut the plan down to the current bottleneck and your real weekly capacity, and park the remaining findings deliberately.

Lesson 3 of 7 in Build the Right Plan
  1. 1Name the outcome first
  2. 2Set the planning focus and the success contract
  3. 3Fit the plan to capacity and the growth model
  4. 4Treat recommended work as advice, not orders
  5. 5Edit, reorder, skip, or discard a plan responsibly
  6. 6Distinguish a fresh plan from a reassessment
  7. 7Close out the plan and keep the learning

Why this matters

A plan that ignores capacity gets abandoned in week two, and an abandoned plan produces no measured results, so Measure and Learn have nothing to work with. A plan that turns every finding into a task spreads effort so thin that the constraint that matters gets no real attention. Fitting the plan to the hours you really have, and to how customers actually find you, is what makes the Plan step executable rather than aspirational.

When to use it

When you review a new draft before pressing "Use this plan", and whenever your available time changes (a hire, a departure, a busy season).

Before you start

  • Your honest weekly marketing hours. The intake asks "How many hours per week can you spend on marketing?"; if it was never answered, the plan assumes 2 to 5 hours.
  • Your growth model, from the intake question "How do most of your customers find you today?" (walk-in, search, referrals, partnerships, or outbound sales).
  • A read of the diagnosis.

Do this

  1. 1Open the Marketing Plan and read the stat under "This week" beside the hero card: the task count and total estimated time for the current phase. Compare it with your real hours.
  2. 2Scan each task's time estimate; a task without one counts as 30 minutes.
  3. 3Press "Save as PDF" to see the plan's "Weekly capacity" and the note explaining how the plan fits it. If the hours are wrong, the plan is sized wrong.
  4. 4Check each channel against your growth model. The plan leaves out findings that do not fit (for example, Google Business Profile work for a referral-driven firm), so a task on a channel your customers do not use deserves a question.
  5. 5If the week is over capacity, keep the work most tied to the primary target. Skip the rest with a reason, or use "Set due date" to move a task into a later phase. Never drop the measurement to save time.
  6. 6If your capacity or growth model has changed, correct it at the source: open the Business Intake from the "Built from your diagnosis" line under the hero card, or press "Edit plan" and say so in the note.

What you should see

A current phase that fits your week, channels that match how customers find you, and later phases ("Next week", "Month 2", "Month 3") collapsed below. Skipped tasks appear struck through with "Restore" beside them. See also Build Your First Plan.

How to judge it

You can say: this week's work totals X hours against my Y, every channel in it matches how customers find us, and here is what I deliberately deferred or skipped, with a reason for each.

What it does not mean

A short plan is not an incomplete one. Findings the plan leaves out are not dismissed; they stay in the diagnosis and can return in a later plan. Time estimates are planning estimates, not commitments, and a plan that fits your capacity is still not guaranteed to move the target.

Try it in Signal & Science

Open the Marketing Plan and compare this week's task count and estimated time with the hours you really have.

Open in Signal & Science

Put it to work

Know what to do next.Know whether it worked.

Signal & Science keeps the evidence, the plan, and the results in one place, so each lesson here becomes a working habit in your own workspace.

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