Your first step in planning for 2025

Imo, you're making it harder for yourself if you're not thinking like this. If we want to talk cyclical living, it helps to talk about having a legacy mindset.

Hi everyone, Claire here from The Periodical! This is Part One of a series on cyclical living and planning. If, like me, you would like to reach the end of this year and feel proud of the creative work you’ve accomplished, without becoming a burnt out piece of toast in the process, you’re in the right place.

Well, friends, it’s a Thursday afternoon in mid-December, and I’ve just returned home from a frosty lunchtime foraging walk with my partner’s mum. I’m back in the U.K. this month, staying in York, in the north of England. Tomorrow, I’ll drive to spend the day with my dear friend Laura.

Today’s mission was wreath-making, so we bundled up in coats and gloves to search for pine, holly, rosehip, and ivy. I love these slow, dark December days. A few years ago, I realised how much I value a sense of spaciousness at this time of year, and I’m grateful to be mostly finished with work for 2024.

Aside from a couple of pieces I plan to write for you and one final group workshop on the Queen of Cups this Monday (which you’re very much invited to), I’ll be taking four weeks off this Christmas. This will be the second of two months off I’ve had this year, both planned well in advance, and both so totally essential.

When I ask a new client why they made the decision to hire me as their coach, the most common response is, “I like how you take breaks throughout the year. I want that for myself.”

And I get it. Years ago, while reading the introduction to Paul Jarvis' Company of One, I burst into tears when he described his friend (an accountant) sharing how he takes September through December off work every year.

This kind of approach to what we call "work-life balance" speaks to me, but it is not possible for everyone, probably not for most of us. Yet, there are things that we can do to set our year up to feel more cyclical: to have planned periods of rest and periods of greater productivity — in other words, a variable rhythm to life and work — and this feels sooooo good to me!!!

Maybe like me, you're doing your 2025 planning now (this is not my regular approach, I'll explain why in the footnotes¹), or you could be returning to this post sometime in the first quarter of the new year. Either way, I'm excited to share ideas with you that I think can make a real difference in how we plan to spend our precious life minutes. Because if that's not important, then what else is there?!

“Life minutes — minutes you can spend sleeping, snuggling, moving, writing, working, hugging, baking, laughing, reading, listening, sharing, making plans, making memories, making amends, making someone’s day a little better.” — Alexandra Franzen

To make the most of my life minutes, I choose to live and work cyclically, and not only by my menstrual cycle. This also includes daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual rhythms, where there is a variation in how I show up to life and work. I'm not working all of the time and I'm not lying around all of the time, either. I am productive, I accomplish what I consider to be a reasonable amount of good quality work each year, and as above, I really do not work all of the time.

So, over the next month-ish, I’m going to walk you through my annual cyclical planning process, right through from annual to quarterly to seasonally to menstrual to daily.

Whether you’re self-employed or salaried or somewhere else on the spectrum of work/life, you might be surprised by the first step! We begin not by looking at 2025, and no, not even by looking back at 2024…

We begin here:

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO HAPPEN IN THE NEXT FIVE-ISH YEARS?

In my 20s, I'd feel stunned when somebody mentioned a holiday they'd booked 18 months in the future, or a plan to relocate in a few years time, or their long-term savings goals… but you know what? They were usually the ones who took the holidays, made the move, saved the money.

I still make and execute a number of my life and business decisions in a relatively short window, but the older I get, the more I realise that the best things I've built and created have quite simply taken quite a lot of time.

I started writing my book proposal in 2016 and it was published in 2020. I started creating the curriculum for my facilitator training in 2019 and only now, five years and six cohorts later, do I feel like I really know what this thing is that I’ve built, and where I want it to go. I had the idea for the podcast I launched this year in 2022, over two years ago. Of course there were intuitive hits, bursts of work, quick decisions, and necessary pivots made during the creation of those projects, but none of them were rushed to completion.

When I look back over the last five years, I notice that there’s actually only a couple of big projects that I’ve brought to fruition (book, training), as well as a couple of smaller ones (Substack, podcast). Who was it that said we overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we do in a decade?² For me, I’m not so sure about that. I think I overestimate all timelines! (We are going to talk more about this in the next part of this planning series).

Something else that I've noticed over a decade of coaching women on living cyclically, is that although we all say we'd love more rest and down-time, we are often the ones who choose not to take it, or we don’t plan well enough for it to actually happen. Yes, sometimes the block to rest is very real: kids, jobs, capitalism, etc., but sometimes (and I think we do really need to admit this) we are the block.

Girl Resting on a Sofa, oil painting by Beatrix Whistler (1857 - 1896)

Having a longer-term vision can help with this.

But listen, friends: this does not need to be (or really want to be) a detailed and inflexible plan.

This first step is more about cultivating a cyclical, legacy mindset or long-term lens where the immediate to-do list lives simply as a moment in a broader arc of life and work. I’m in this for the long-game! I want to build a sustained and enjoyable body of work, not just a series of cute reels.

(On that note: a couple of months ago, I decided to play with Instagram again, and try my hand at making reels for each day of the menstrual cycle. OMG it took me sooooo long to make each one! Even with templates. Even keeping it simple. They looked good, but honestly, I know in my heart I would much prefer to pour that time and energy into something that really contributes to my growing body of work. Instagram can be the overflow from that, but it’s not the main meal. A long-term legacy mindset helps to prioritise and step back from what everyone else is doing, or what we could be doing, blah blah blah, and focus on what we actually want to be focusing on.)

This kind of planning helps us to stop when we need to stop. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport says:

The idea that adding more plans to your life can help you slow down might seem paradoxical. The magic here is in the way that this strategy expands the timescales at which you’re evaluating your productivity.

When we "expand the timescales" with a legacy mindset and tune in to the next few years of life, including all of the things we'd like to make, experience, and accomplish, the immediate moment feels far less fraught with urgency. Suddenly, that project doesn't need to be completed today or this week or even this month, because it's just one small piece of a larger, more intentional journey. You can let it go! You can take your rest!

One of my mentors, Alexandra Pope, said to me years ago, "Claire, you're thirty years old, you have so much time." And it’s true: on a Friday afternoon, I can accept that there are tasks on my list of things to do that did not get completed, but I still take a weekend (and I always take three day weekends, so I ain’t looking at that task again until Tuesday tbh), because I ACTUALLY HAVE SO MUCH TIME. I can take a few days offline when I bleed because I ACTUALLY HAVE SO MUCH TIME. I can take a few weeks off over Christmas because I ACTUALLY HAVE SO MUCH TIME.

When Alexandra reminded me of this, she herself was in her 70s, and had just shared her 20-year vision with me. 20 years! Talk about expanded timelines. Talk about legacy. Talk about freedom, honestly.

Here, rest and space aren't lost time, or even procrastination. Instead, they can be considered just as essential and normal and valuable as chapters of productivity. Cue: less stress. And, probably: more sustainable and enjoyable progress. Which means definitely: better spent life minutes.

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Journaling prompts for you:

• When you imagine your future self five years from now, how do they feel? What energy are they radiating?

• What are three things you'd love to have accomplished by the end of those five years that would make you feel truly proud? (Tip: have a look back over your last five years to get a sense of what is realistic for you)

• Which parts of your current life do you want to preserve exactly as they are, and what parts are you ready to transform completely?

• If fear wasn't a factor, what would you absolutely do in the next five years?

• What kind of legacy are you interested in creating?

• Reflecting on the above: what does this tell you about your 2025?

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Soon, we’ll talk about reflecting on 2024 and mapping out your seasons and quarters, before moving into lots of menstrual, weekly and daily tips that I’m super excited to share with you. I love talking about this stuff!! I’m a J on the Myers Briggs, so planning really is my apricot jam.

Talk to me in the comments:

• How does this idea land with you?

• What questions do you have about cyclical planning?

• What’s your vibe for 2025?

Big love!

Ps. Edited to add: Part Two is now published, with a 27-minute audio to boot.

1. I’ve always found it hard to visualise time beyond December of the present year. Ironically, for someone devoted to cyclical living, I see the year as quite linear — January and December standing like opposing poles on a timeline, seemingly disconnected from one another. And yet, of course, they are neighbours! I think this linear mindset explains why I usually struggle to plan for the upcoming year until we tick over into January. Then, it’s easy! Calendars and highlighters at the ready, the full 365 days unfurl before me. But honestly, it’s not really into February, once we hit Chinese New Year and Imbolc and “Australian Back to School” energy that I really start getting into the year. However, 2025 feels different. After five years of what feels like universal chaos and upheaval, and some seismic personal shifts too, I find myself in late 2024 craving preparation, and a sense of really having a plan.

2. The internet tells me it could be Bill Gates, Tony Robbins, or a Stanford computer scientist I’ve not heard of.