The math is clean but it misses the point. Planning quality matters more than planning duration, and I've watched founders spend nine days producing a plan nobody believes in and three hours producing one that actually changes behavior.

The framing assumes planning and execution are sequential, but for early-stage companies the best plans get stress-tested and revised *during* execution — so the real question is whether your planning process builds in that feedback loop, not how many days you spend upfront.

This framework treats planning like it has a fixed shape, but the cost of under-planning scales with the complexity of what you're building — nine days is fine if the work is legible, catastrophic if it isn't.