A Six Week Periodization For My Life

Origins and Reasoning

Two events happened to me in short succession: First, I listened to an episode of The Future of Coding Podcast containing an interview with Devine Lu Linvega , where he describes his custom calendar and clock. There are 26 "months" in his calendar each with 14 days. At the end of the year there are either one or two days, depending on if it is a leap year, that are special and stand alone to make the fourteen day cycle fit evently into a calendar year. It might seem impractical to you that someone would develop their own bespoke system to keep track of time, but would you still feel that way if I told you that he and his partner live full-time on a sail boat? It would? Ah, well.

And then shortly after listening to that podcast, a co-worker of mine mentioned that he started using Basecamp's Shape Up six-week cycle for building Web products in his own life. He sets goals that he hopes can be fulfilled in a six week period, similar to how Basecamp works in six week cycles.

This got me thinking about periodization. I too wanted a duration that I can use as a checkpoint to record aspects of my life: notable events and progress on personal goals.

If we consider the possible durations for this kind of life checkpoint, the most obvious and ubiquituous option is the calendar year. Many people make New Year's Resolutions at the start of each year and "Year in Review" blog posts and publications are prevelant at the end. But for me one year feels far too long to even remember what happened in my life. Additionally, I don't think I've ever set a goal at the beginning of a year that I've tracked beyond a month or so.

Measuring by seasons is very natural (duh) but like most of modern man I am less sensitive to the exact timing of the passing of the seasons than those who came before me. Also, four periods a year is better than one, but still too long for me.

A month is a reasonable period, but I am not truly attuned to the passing of months. A new month can arrive without me noticing. They don't have a uniform length. I don't think going full lunar month is a good idea for me either. I'm not bragging when I say that I rarely know what phase the moon is in.

As a wage worker the cadence that I ultimately live by is the seven-day work week. I may not know how many days remain in the current month but I always know how far into the current week we are. So I'd like my periodization to be built around a certain number of weeks. At Basecamp they landed on six weeks for completing a project, and in my gut I agree.

"We work in six-week cycles. Six weeks is long enough to build something meaningful start-to-finish and short enough that everyone can feel the deadline looming from the start, so they use the time wisely." - Shape Up

As an extra requirement, I don't want my segments to span calendar years, so I decided to start the first segment on the first Monday of the year and continue for a duration of six weeks. In order to avoid amiguity with months I'll use an alpabetic naming scheme: 24.A is January 1st (Monday) to February 11, 2024. 24.B is February 12th (Monday) to March 24, 2024. And so on. That creates eight cycles that will fit into any calendar year, A through H.

24.H ends on December 01, 2024. From there I'll have a segment that doesn't fill a full six weeks, which I'll set apart as an intercalary period¹ and just call it 24.Christmas. During that period my family will be traveling and celebrating Christmas with relatives, so I don't need to try to make that time fit into a regularly shaped period.

Per Period

At the end of each period I hope to stop and record notable events, what I was working on, reading, and thinking about, hopefully in the form of a blog post on this site. I'm going to re-structure my weightlifing plan slightly to fit into six weeks. I'd like to set some negative goals per period, for instance a hard upper limit on alcohol or desserts consumed. And for my long-term goals I should record my progress per period to see if I'm satisfied with the momentum or if I've been stuck and deluding myself.

Like many people I have more things that I would like to accomplish that what I have time for. It brings me some peace to write projects that I'd like to get to into my Someday/Maybe bucket à la Getting Things Done. But the six week cycle gives me some additional cover. At the beginning of cycle I should be able to mark some projects as in scope for the next six weeks, and then not worry about doing anything about the rest. When the cycle completes I can re-evaluate and determine if a "Someday" project's day has finally come.

Onward

I came up with this strategy in 24.F and so I am writing a blog post recording some of what I remember about that period. 24.G starts tomorrow.

September 9, 2024

^{1. The Aztec calendar had eighteen 20-day months, followed by a 5 day period called the Nēmontēmi at the end of the year.↩}