Looking for calculators? jump to our free tools
Steven Alexander CPA Inc.accounting. advisory. growth.

Home/Resources/The Four-Week Edit

Coaching & personal development

Four weeks to edit the next six months.

You already run this loop on your business every year: decide where you’re going, cut what isn’t earning its keep, build the systems, then report on the numbers. Almost nobody runs it on themselves. This worksheet does — four weeks of setup that carry the next six months.

The four-week structure — envision, delete, install, track — is adapted from the 4-Week Edit taught by Dan Martell. The prompts, wording, and owner-operator framing below are ours. Credit where it’s due; the work is yours.

Where to start

Work top to bottom — each week builds on the one before it, and Week 3 makes no sense without Week 2. Give yourself about 45 minutes for the whole thing. Nothing you type leaves your browser; it saves on this device so you can come back to it. When you’re done, hit Download my plan at the bottom for a PDF you can print, pin up, or bring to a coaching conversation.

Week one — envision

You can’t change a life you haven’t described. “Get healthier” and “make more money” aren’t targets — they’re moods. Write the next six months down with the same specificity you’d use on a year-end financial statement, and write it as though it has already happened.

1.1 — Describe the version of you six months from now

Pick your date first, then write each box in the past or present tense — “I weigh 182 and I ran a 10K,” not “I want to lose weight.” Future tense keeps it a wish. Be embarrassingly specific: numbers, names, places.

Six months out. Everything below is already true on this date.
One sentence. What actually changed?
Weight, energy, sleep, what you can do that you can’t do today.
Revenue, profit, what you paid yourself, what you invested, what you stopped spending on.
Where the hours went. What a good Tuesday looks like. What you no longer do.
Who you’re surrounded by — and who you’re not.
Why the tense matters: written in future tense, your brain files it as a someday. Written as though it already happened, it becomes a gap between two facts — and gaps get closed.

1.2 — Make it something you can look at

Words on a page get read once. A picture on your lock screen gets seen forty times a day. Paste the four boxes above into your AI tool of choice along with this prompt, then set the result as your phone or desktop wallpaper.

Copy this prompt

Here is a description of my life six months from now, written as though it has already happened. Read it, then ask me up to five questions about anything that's vague or missing. Once I've answered, generate one photorealistic image that places me inside that life — a single scene, not a collage — so I can see it every day. [Paste your four boxes here.]

1.3 — Work backwards: have, be, do

Hope isn’t a plan. You’ve written what you want to have. Now name who you’d have to be for that to be normal, and what that person does on an ordinary Wednesday. Identity is downstream of habits — and once a habit becomes an identity, you stop needing willpower for it.

Pull the three or four that matter most out of the boxes above.
“I am ___” statements. Write them even if today there’s no evidence.
The ordinary, repeatable behaviours. These become your non-negotiables in Week 3, so keep them small enough to be boring.

Week two — delete

You can’t build the new life on top of the old one — there’s no room. Before anything gets installed, something gets cut. Two things quietly eat the six months you just planned: what’s in your calendar, and who’s in your circle.

2.1 — Audit where the time actually goes

For one week, set a timer and write down what you were doing every fifteen minutes. It feels absurd for about two days, and then it’s the most useful thing you’ve done all quarter — because most of us are wrong about our own calendars. When the week is up, go back through and mark each recurring item: did it push you toward what you wrote in Week 1, or pull you away from it?

What it isPush or pull?What you’ll do about it
Friction beats willpower. Willpower runs out by about 4pm; friction doesn’t. It’s far easier to avoid the thing than to fight it — log out of the app, leave the wine at the store, put the phone in another room. Make the wrong choice cost thirty extra seconds and most of it disappears on its own.

2.2 — Run a friend inventory

You become the average of the people you spend time with, and they quietly set your ceiling. List everyone you’ve given real hours to in the last 60 days. Then be honest about each one: do you leave the conversation with more energy than you came in with, or less? This one is uncomfortable, because some names on the wrong side of the list have been there for twenty years. You’re not cutting anyone off — you’re deciding where the hours go.

Name them before you name people, or you’ll just sort by who you like. Three to five words.
PersonWhich are they?What changes
Simple rule: if you saw them at the mall, would you pretend not to? Unfollow. Who’s coming off the list?

2.3 — Say it out loud

A decision nobody knows about isn’t a decision, it’s a preference. Tell the people who’ll see you slip.

Week three — install

Last week you made the wrong things hard. This week you make the right things easy, and then you make a small number of them non-negotiable. Environment does more work than motivation ever will — the same person performs very differently in a different room.

3.1 — Design the room so it does the work

Three levers, in order of how much they move: what’s physically in your path, what’s going into your head, and who’s in the room. One concrete change each — something you could do this weekend, not a principle.

Make tomorrow’s right decision today, while it’s cheap.
What you read, watch and listen to is a diet, whether you chose it or not.
Where you’ll be the least experienced person present. That discomfort is the whole point.
Ask past the person, not at them. Instead of “can you help me with X,” try “do you know anyone who’s good at X?” It costs them nothing to answer — and nine times out of ten the reply is “well, I could. What do you need?”

3.2 — Set your daily non-negotiables

Not twenty habits — three to five. One or two each for mind, body and business, pulled straight from your “do” list in Week 1. Start embarrassingly small: one page, one set, one call. Small enough that skipping it would be silly. Then staple each one to something you already do without thinking — the toothbrush, the coffee, the school run — so the existing habit carries the new one.

The non-negotiableAreaStapled to…
One missed day is life. Two in a row is a new pattern. Write the rule you’ll hold.

3.3 — Put something on the line

Most people will do more to avoid a loss than to chase a win. So set both, and make the downside sting enough that you’d be genuinely annoyed to pay it.

Book it now, at least partly, so it exists before you earn it.
Money, embarrassment, or something you’d hate to give up. Tell someone who’ll collect.

Week four — track

The machine is built. This is the week that decides whether it still runs in March. Most people don’t quit because they failed — they quit because they couldn’t see that they were winning. You’d never run a business on vibes for six months; don’t run yourself that way either.

4.1 — Pick one North Star

One number, not twenty. The one that, if it’s moving, means everything else is probably fine. Weight, monthly profit, pages written, sessions trained, calls made. Write where it stands today, honestly, because that number is the baseline you’ll be glad to look back at.

One number. If it’s moving, everything else is probably fine.
The honest number, not the one you’d quote at a barbecue.
Ambitious enough to change your week, not so wild you ignore it.

4.2 — Build the daily scorecard

The North Star is the result. These are the few leading numbers that cause it — the things you actually control on a Tuesday. Log them at the same time every day, in the same place, as the last thing you do. Put it in your calendar; don’t rely on remembering.

What I log dailyWhat good looks like
A time and a place, not “in the evening”.
Review the week, then pick one or two moves for the next one. Not fifteen.

4.3 — Make it public

Sunlight is the cheapest accountability there is. Post the photo, send the weekly number to a group chat, tell the team. It doesn’t need an audience — it needs a witness.

Your plan

Take it with you.

Everything you’ve typed becomes a clean, printable PDF — four weeks on paper, with your North Star and your check-in date on the front. Print it, pin it above the desk, or bring it to your next planning conversation.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere — it stays in this browser on this device, so you can close the tab and pick it up tomorrow. Clearing your browser data, or opening the page on a different device, starts you fresh.

The part most people miss

It’s a loop, not a launch.

Envision→ Delete→ Install→ Track↻

Four weeks of setup, six months of running it, then you sit down and do the whole thing again — with a bigger number in the box. The calendar was never the point; you don’t have to wait for January any more than a business has to wait for its year-end to fix something. Six months is six months, whenever you start it.

Common questions

Before you start.

Do I really have to do this over four weeks?

No — the setup itself takes under an hour if you’re honest and quick. The four weeks matter for the two that need real-world data: the time log in Week 2 needs an actual week of your actual life, and the habits in Week 3 need a few days of testing before you commit to them. Fill in what you can now, come back for the rest.

What if I fill in the boxes and then just don’t do it?

That’s what Weeks 3 and 4 exist for, and it’s why they aren’t optional. A plan with no stake, no scorecard and no witness is a document. A plan with a Friday review, a number you log nightly and one person who’ll ask about it is a system. If you only do two things on this page, do the daily scorecard and the weekly check-in.

Is my information stored anywhere?

No. Everything stays in your own browser’s local storage on this device — nothing is transmitted to us or to anyone else, and we can’t see it. The PDF is generated on your machine too. The trade-off is that it won’t follow you to another device, so download the PDF if you want a copy that lasts.

What does any of this have to do with accounting?

More than it looks. Nearly every owner we work with hits the same wall eventually — the business is fine, and they’re the constraint. Tired, over-committed, doing $40 work at 11pm. You can’t model your way out of that on a spreadsheet. Planning the operator is part of planning the business, and the discipline is identical: set the target, cut the waste, build the system, then report on it.

Whose framework is this?

The four-week arc — envision, delete, install, track, then loop — comes from Dan Martell’s 4-Week Edit, which he teaches on his channel and to the founders he coaches. We found it genuinely useful, rewrote the prompts in our own words for owner-operators, and built the worksheet so you could actually fill it in rather than nod along. If it lands, go watch the original.

When you’re ready

The plan is easy. The next six months are the work.

If your Week 1 boxes have numbers in them — revenue, profit, what you pay yourself, what you’d like to stop doing — that’s a conversation worth having out loud. Bring the PDF.

Book a 30-min chat or Send us an email

← Back to all resources