Where did the year go? How to plan time at the year level
By PlanJour team, Sparklithic Ltd · Published · Updated
Weekly planning cannot answer whether this year contained a holiday. Year-level planning is a different exercise, and almost nobody does it deliberately.
The gap nobody plans in
Most planning happens at two scales. There is the day, which is where to-do lists and calendars live. And there is the vague, annual kind that produces resolutions in January and nothing measurable afterwards.
Between them is the scale where life actually happens: the year, divided into weeks. Fifty-two of them. Enough to see, few enough to count.
Hardly anyone plans there, and it is the only scale at which certain questions can be asked at all.
Questions only the year can answer
- How many weeks of this year had anything in them that was not work?
- Did I take a real break, or did I take four long weekends and call it a holiday?
- I said this was the year I would do the thing. Which weeks was it ever going to happen in?
A weekly planner cannot answer any of these. By design it shows you seven days and hides the other 358.
Fifty-two squares
The exercise is simple enough to do on paper. Draw fifty-two squares. Colour each one for what it was mostly for.
Most people find the same two things. First, the colours are less varied than expected — one category dominates far more than it felt like at the time. Second, the things they care about most occupy fewer squares than the things they care about least.
That is not a productivity insight. It is just arithmetic you had not done.
Planning forward instead of grieving backward
The backward version is interesting. The forward version is useful.
Decide, before the year runs, roughly how you want the fifty-two to divide. Not which Tuesday — just the proportion. Twelve weeks where health is the point. Six that belong to other people. Four genuinely off.
It will be wrong. That is fine, and it is not the purpose. The purpose is that when a week arrives you have a prior about what it was supposed to be for, and noticing you have spent nine weeks in a row on one thing takes a glance rather than a reckoning in December.
What PlanJour does with it
The Year Planner lets you set that intended split, then shows it beside the real one drawn from your actual calendar. Two shapes, side by side: the year you chose and the year you are having.
The comparison is the whole feature. A plan you never check is a wish, and a record you never compare against anything is just data.
Because every event carries a life category, the real side builds itself — you are not maintaining a second system. And because past events can be confirmed as having actually happened, the real side is the real side rather than the booked one.
A reasonable objection
Planning a year is a strange thing to do if your year is not yours to plan. Shift work, caring responsibilities, an unpredictable employer — all of these make the proportions somebody else's decision.
It is still worth doing, for a different reason. Seeing the split you do not control is what makes the small part you do control visible, and you can usually place four weeks even when you cannot place fifty-two.
Where to start
Do not plan the year. Plan the quarter, see whether comparing it to reality tells you anything, and extend it if it does.
The Year Planner is part of PlanJour Plus. The calendar, the life categories and the time balance view that feed it are free. Start free and try the retrospective half first — it costs nothing and it is the half that changes minds.