What Are Rocks?
In the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), Rocks are the 3–7 most important things your company must accomplish in the next 90 days. The name comes from a classic time-management exercise: if you fill a jar with sand and pebbles first, the big rocks won't fit — but if you put the big rocks in first, everything else falls into place around them.
Rocks are your big rocks. They are the priorities that, if accomplished, will make the quarter a success regardless of what else happens.
Why 90-Day Cycles Work
Annual plans are too far away to drive daily behavior. Weekly plans are too short for meaningful progress on strategic goals. Ninety days is the sweet spot — long enough to accomplish something significant, short enough to stay focused and course-correct quickly.
Research consistently shows that most people can focus on 3–7 major priorities at once before performance degrades. EOS formalizes this with a 90-day window and a small number of Rocks per person.
How to Set Rocks
Step 1: Start with Company Rocks
Every quarter, your leadership team should agree on 3–7 Company Rocks — the most important objectives for the business as a whole. These should be:
- Specific: "Close 10 enterprise accounts" not "grow sales"
- Measurable: You'll know when it's done
- Achievable: Challenging but realistic in 90 days
- Owned: One person is accountable, even if multiple people contribute
Step 2: Cascade to Individual Rocks
Once Company Rocks are set, each leadership team member sets their own 3–7 Individual Rocks that support the company objectives. Not every Individual Rock needs to map to a Company Rock — personal development Rocks are valid too.
Step 3: Write the "Done When" Statement
For each Rock, write a brief statement that defines what done looks like. This eliminates ambiguity at the end of the quarter. A good done-when statement is:
- One sentence
- Objectively verifiable
- Agreed upon before the quarter starts
Example: "Launch the new onboarding flow — done when 90% of new signups complete step 1 within 48 hours."
Running the Weekly Check-In
Each week in your Level 10 meeting, every Rock owner reports on track or off track. That's it. No lengthy updates. If a Rock is off track, it goes on the Issues List for the team to solve.
The power of this format is its simplicity — it takes 5 minutes to review all Rocks and immediately surfaces problems before they become crises.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Too many Rocks. If everyone has 10 Rocks, nothing is truly a priority. Stick to 3–7.
Vague Rocks. "Improve marketing" is not a Rock. "Publish 8 case studies and increase qualified leads by 15%" is a Rock.
Rocks that are really projects. A Rock should be completable in 90 days. If it's bigger than that, break it into multiple quarterly Rocks.
No owner. Every Rock needs a single accountable person. "The team" is not an owner.
Forgetting Milestones. Break each Rock into monthly or bi-weekly milestones. If you're at 0% progress in week 6, you have a problem — milestones surface this early.
Using Taskspace to Track Rocks
Taskspace is built around EOS workflows, with Rocks as a first-class concept. Each Rock in Taskspace supports:
- Progress tracking (0–100%) with +/- quick controls
- Milestones to break large goals into weekly checkpoints
- Status (on track, at risk, blocked, completed)
- Owner assignment with email-based lookup
- Quarter grouping so you can see all Q1 vs Q2 Rocks at a glance
Your team can update Rock progress directly from the dashboard, and managers get an at-a-glance view of which Rocks are at risk before the weekly meeting.
Getting Started Today
You don't need to implement all of EOS at once. Start with just Rocks:
- Schedule a 2-hour quarterly planning session
- Identify the 3 most important things your company must accomplish this quarter
- Assign one owner to each
- Write the done-when statement
- Check progress every week in your team standup
After one quarter, you'll wonder how you ever ran a business without them.