A planning course with no productivity system in it. Seven lessons spent designing twelve months that are not all the same shape, ending in one sheet with the empty stretches marked first.
You already accept that a working life needs periods shaped differently. You still planned this year exactly like the last one.
Twelve months, each one expected to produce, each one given the same instruction. A plan built out of identical units is not really a plan; it is a container, and its great advantage is that it is never wrong on the day it is made. It only becomes wrong in August, when the month you had quietly written off arrives on schedule and takes the work with it.
This course designs a year with shape in it. Where the heavy work sits, given everything else in your life that will not move. Where the deliberately empty stretches sit, marked before anything else, because an empty stretch that has to be earned is always the first thing cancelled. What happens at the joins between the two, which is where a designed year usually fails. And how a year survives the month that goes wrong, which it will, on a date nobody can name in advance.
There is no system here, no tool to install and no method for arranging a week. The work is a reading of the year you actually had, three decisions about the year ahead, and one sheet of paper. The whole of it is about the work, not about you.
The output is a single figure with twelve squares in it and three of them left blank on purpose, plus one plain sentence per stretch saying what that stretch is for. It is short, it is unimpressive, and it holds up in March, which is the only test that matters.
Founders and independent operators whose year is genuinely theirs to shape and who have never once shaped it.
Senior people inside organisations who cannot move the fixed dates and can still decide what sits between them.
Consultants, writers and creative professionals whose output has always clustered unevenly and who have treated the clustering as a fault rather than as information.
Anyone who has already agreed that the year should have periods of different weight and got as far as agreeing.
Lesson 2 asks you to reconstruct the year you actually had from records you already keep, and everything after it stands on that reconstruction, so do it before you design anything. The rest is short. The finished sheet will look thinner than a year's plan is supposed to look. That thinness is the design working.