Set the Planning Horizon

Overview

The planning horizon tells CntX how many days forward to look when proposing calendar items, briefs, and—when you run campaigns—dated plan slots across targeted workspaces. It works together with editorial cadence (weekly, biweekly, or monthly rhythm) and weekly effort budget (how many content units your team can realistically produce per week) to keep AI-assisted planning grounded in operational reality.

Think of horizon as time depth, cadence as planning rhythm, and effort budget as volume ceiling. A four-week horizon with a weekly cadence and a budget of six units per week produces a different shape than a twelve-week horizon with the same budget—the planner spreads types and pillars across more weeks but respects the same per-week capacity buckets.

For evergreen content strategies, horizon drives recurring period generation and optional auto-brief cycles. For campaign strategies, horizon aligns with the campaign window: start and end dates bound the initiative, while child strategies per workspace inherit frequencies and capacity rules used when generating the full campaign plan. The unified calendar can display multiple planning layers—Strategy, Campaign, Opportunity, and Manual—so horizon choices in one strategy do not silently overwrite another, but capacity in a given workspace week is shared.

When to use

Adjust planning horizon and cadence when you:

• Create a new content strategy and need to decide how far ahead to generate the first editorial period.
• Shift from experimentation to steady-state publishing and want longer lookahead without over-committing writers.
• Prepare a campaign whose dated slots must cover a launch window without spilling past your real delivery capacity.
• See generation propose too many items per week, or conversely leave large gaps because the horizon is too short for your cadence.
• Operate multiple workspaces and need each campaign target’s child strategy to respect local publishing rhythm.

Revisit horizon after major context changes—new product line, new market, agency takeover—rather than letting stale plans run on old assumptions.

Before you start

• Have a draft or active content strategy, or a campaign communication strategy with start and end dates defined.
• Estimate realistic weekly output: count writers, approval cycles, and design dependencies. The effort budget is a planning unit, not a promise of fully finished assets.
• Know your timezone preference for brief generation; strategies can inherit workspace timezone so week boundaries align with how your team works (Monday-start weeks in local time).
• Confirm content types, channels, and funnel distribution are configured; horizon without structure produces empty or generic plans.
• For campaigns: confirm targets (workspaces) are selected so per-workspace child strategies exist before plan generation.

Steps

1. Open Content strategy → [strategy name] for evergreen planning, or Campaigns → [campaign] → Strategy for a campaign-linked strategy.
2. In General information, verify start date and, for campaigns or fixed initiatives, end date. Open-ended evergreen strategies may leave end date empty; campaigns should bound the window explicitly.
3. Set Editorial cadence to weekly, biweekly, or monthly. This defines how the planner groups periods and how auto-brief cycles align if enabled on recurrent strategies.
4. Set Weekly effort budget (`maxItemsPerWeek` in planning terms). This is the nominal ceiling of content units distributed across enabled channels using effort coefficients—not a hard production quota, but the primary capacity guardrail.
5. Set Planning horizon (days)—commonly 28–90 days for evergreen work, or match the campaign duration for one-off initiatives. Shorter horizons reduce review load; longer horizons help agencies and heads of content see thematic balance early.
6. If available, confirm briefs generation timezone matches the workspace where most publishing happens. Week boundaries affect capacity buckets and slot dates.
7. Review channel frequencies against the effort budget. CntX warns when summed channel targets exceed weekly capacity; lower frequencies or raise the budget until the warning clears.
8. Save the strategy. For campaigns, repeat a sanity check on each workspace tab: child strategies may adjust channel enablement while sharing the common date range and key messages.
9. Trigger Generate calendar (evergreen) or proceed to Generate plan on the campaign when horizon and capacity look right. Inspect the first week especially—capacity conflicts show up early.

Expected result

Your strategy stores a coherent planning window, cadence, timezone-aware week model, and weekly effort budget. The next generation pass proposes dated items only inside the horizon and respects per-week capacity buckets across enabled channels.

Campaign plan generation distributes slots week by week and workspace by workspace, using child strategy frequencies rather than a one-size-fits-all calendar. The unified Calendar view can show campaign layers alongside evergreen strategy layers so you see how the horizon fills without guessing from isolated lists.

Tips / common issues

• Generation proposes too many items — Channel frequencies exceed the weekly effort budget. Lower per-channel targets or increase the budget; see Understand Campaign Capacity and Calendar Conflicts when campaigns overlap evergreen work.
• Sparse calendar — Horizon too short, too few channels enabled, or strategy paused. Extend horizon days or enable additional types/channels with realistic frequencies.
• Dates feel wrong — Timezone mismatch shifts week starts. Set briefs generation timezone to the workspace publishing timezone.
• Campaign runs past end date — Fix campaign strategy end date before regenerating; stale plans may retain old slot dates until you regenerate.
• Biweekly/monthly cadence confusion — Capacity still evaluates per ISO week inside broader buckets; biweekly capacity equals roughly twice the weekly budget for display, but strict gates may still check individual weeks.
• Set and forget — Horizon is not permanent. Shorten it during resource crunches; extend it when staffing stabilizes.

Next step

Build Your First Editorial Calendar to generate your opening period and review proposed briefs against the horizon and capacity you just configured.