(Yes, that is a Dune reference)
I’m currently deeply engaged in planning… for my clients, for myself, and for my upcoming course (which is in and of itself about about planning).
For my clients, I remind them that they need to start thinking about 2026, about wrapping up the year, about Q1. And I serve as a sanity check for level and scope of planning. So things like:
- Don’t put all your tiny tasks in your annual plan!
- Don’t under-sell what you can do in a year – a year is a long time
- Don’t oversell what you can do by December… time is flying by!
- Remember, you don’t have to know everything, you will be checking back on this every few months
- You need to choose where you will focus, if you try to choose everything all at once, it virtually guarantees failure
I can do this because a) I’m not emotionally invested — I care about my clients deeply, yes, but I have some distance that can be helpful and b) I have many years of experience.
For myself, I try to follow my own advice! For example, I just finished creating the 2026 planner spreadsheet, harvesting all the data I track (not necessarily filling in every bit of advice I distill from the data – I like to do that a quarter at a time as I go so I don’t burn out). Next year I’m tracking degrees of exaltation, expanding the todo suggestions, and automating more.
I’m also considering my 2026 plan for myself personally, for my household, and of course for Circle Thrice. Just yesterday, my husband and I hung out on the deck discussing our plans. We made broad categories including financial, household, personal, and business and we identified the major initiatives we wanted to focus on this coming year. These aren’t hard boundaries by the way, most of these things link into one another. So our rainwater catchment project certainly has a financial impact and our business goals tie neatly into our personal ones.
For example one of my business goals for the coming year is to arrange the broader scope of my work more effectively to include some longer break times. With the monthly planner and ritual, weekly substack and video blog, and regular consultations, I feel like I can’t ever entirely unplug for more than a day or so at a time. Irony of irony, when you work for yourself and still end up in the same situation you always end up in in your day jobs (it’s actually a me problem!). In any case, I’m not particularly good at leisure – which is weird with how inherently lazy I can be, but I at least need to focus on something different sometimes. This ties into a household goal to create more space for hands-on creation.
My upcoming course is getting planned as well, which is funny since it’s a significant rework of my cycle mapping course as more of a nested cycle map/action course. So I’m planning about planning, which is very meta indeed. This was the course I was most unhappy with last time, not because it was wrong, but because it lacked an overarching framework for presenting the material in a way I think resonated best and felt disconnected from the course that comes before (the Goals course, which I just wrapped up). But over the past months, I have had an epiphany about cyclical mapping that clarified everything I was already doing but in a way that resonates magically and astrologically.
During this quarter, I’m going to share tidbits about my own plans here in the blog (one of which is blogging more – lol).
