Time Core · Year Wheel · Module
The cycle
What actually repeats annually — the demand pattern, the operating rhythm and the planning cycle — drawn rather than assumed.
The idea
How it works
Every organisation has a year that repeats, and most run it without drawing it, which means the same collisions are discovered annually and treated as coincidence.
Drawing it takes an afternoon and produces two findings immediately: where cycles collide, and which months are already full before anything new is added.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Draw the three cycles together
Demand, operations and planning on one page. The collisions are only visible when they overlap.
- 02
Use last year rather than the intended year
What actually happened, including the things that ran late.
- 03
Mark the collisions
Where two demanding periods overlap. Each recurs annually and each is planned around separately.
- 04
Keep it visible
A wheel in a drawer is a wheel nobody plans against.
One level in
The components of the cycle
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
The same collisions recur every year and are treated as coincidence each time, because nobody drew the wheel.
The other modules in year wheel
Fixed points
The dates that cannot move: statutory deadlines, contractual dates, industry events and periods when nothing can be changed.
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