Time Core · Year Wheel · Module
Fixed points
The dates that cannot move: statutory deadlines, contractual dates, industry events and periods when nothing can be changed.
The idea
How it works
Some dates are genuinely fixed and some are treated as fixed because nobody has asked. Separating them is what creates the room to move things.
Freeze periods — when nothing may be changed — are the constraint most often forgotten in planning, and they remove weeks from the available year.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
List what genuinely cannot move
Statutory, contractual and external. Everything else is negotiable and is usually treated as though it is not.
- 02
Mark the freeze periods
Peak trading, year end, regulatory windows. Weeks in which nothing can be changed are weeks unavailable for work.
- 03
Check which fixed dates are actually fixed
Some internal deadlines have been immovable for years because nobody has asked whether they still need to be.
- 04
Plan the immovable first
Everything else arranges around them. Planning the flexible work first produces collisions.
One level in
The components of fixed points
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Some internal deadlines have been immovable for years because nobody has asked whether they still need to be.
The other modules in year wheel
The cycle
What actually repeats annually — the demand pattern, the operating rhythm and the planning cycle — drawn rather than assumed.
LearnLoad across the year
How work distributes against a capacity that is not constant, and where the year is already over-committed.
LearnThe review rhythm
Where the organisation’s reviews sit in the year — the mechanism by which the whole framework gets used rather than consulted.
Learn