A cyclical approach isn’t like living the traditional calendar, where your days are the same one month to the next. Where goals are set I. January and you work tirelessly towards them, regardless of the season, until December.

A cyclical approach focuses on rhythm, it moves in a different way.

I think we have become so used to treating every month as though it is essentially the same that we have forgotten to notice that we aren’t the same throughout the year.

Just as the light changes, the seasons change, Nature changes….

Our energy changes too. Our priorities change — And yet the way we plan often stays exactly the same.

Traditional planning doesn’t account for our humanness, our need for rest. It views time as linear and expects us to conform, but that’s NOT a sustainable way to live.

There is another way to approach your year, and it begins with recognising that you are not a machine moving through a calendar — You are a human being living within cycles, and when you begin to plan with those cycles, rather than constantly trying to override them, your year can start to feel very different.

Living your year as a cycle

When I talk about living your year in rhythm, I’m not talking about abandoning goals, becoming completely unstructured or waiting for the perfect moment to take action.

It is actually the opposite.

It is about creating a structure that allows you to work with yourself rather than constantly working against yourself.

There can still be ambition, growth, creativity, business goals, financial goals, projects you want to bring to life and things you want to achieve. The difference is that you stop expecting yourself to approach all of those things with the same energy, focus and capacity every day of the year. Instead, you begin to ask a different question: What is this particular moment asking of me?

That question can be applied on a yearly level, a seasonal level, a monthly level, a weekly level and even within a single day. Because rhythm exists at multiple levels:

The year has its rhythm, the seasons have their rhythm, the Moon has a monthly rhythm. Your week has its rhythm, and, perhaps most importantly, you have your own rhythm.

The aim isn’t to follow every cycle perfectly, but to become more aware of them and use that awareness to make better decisions about where your energy goes.

Your year: working with the seasons

On a yearly basis, living in rhythm might mean stepping away from the idea that January has to be the ultimate starting point.

January is simply one point within a much larger cycle. In nature, the beginning of the year is the spring equinox in March. So using January as the start of the year means it falls in the depths of winter. The days are still short, the landscape is quieter, and the natural world is largely in a period of rest, dormancy and conservation. January may be the start of the year, but this doesn’t mean it needs to be the moment when you suddenly decide that you need to become a completely different person or leap into new goals and taking action.

In a cyclical approach, Winter has another purpose. It’s a time for dreaming, visioning, reflecting, recalibrating and listening. This is a much slower approach to starting the traditional year; it takes the pressure off and allows our bodies to align with the season we’re in (Winter), where rest and energy conservation are in the game, rather than trying to lose weight or start other New Year’s goals and resolutions.

Rather than immediately asking, What do I need to achieve this year?, you might begin by asking, What do I want this year to feel like? What matters to me now? What am I ready to leave behind? What wants to emerge? You can decide on the goals in January, then, as the year moves towards spring and the Spring Equinox, you can begin to move from imagining into action.

Spring naturally lends itself to beginnings, growth, experimentation and putting energy behind the things you want to develop. This is the point in your year when you set your bigger goals into motion, establish your priorities and begin actively building towards them.

Summer can bring expansion, visibility, creativity, connection and momentum, while autumn invites us to begin gathering what we have created, taking stock, refining, releasing what is no longer needed and turning our attention back towards what matters most. And then, eventually, we return to winter, and the cycle has turned.

This means your year doesn’t have to be twelve months of relentless forward movement. There are periods of dreaming, periods of planting, periods of growing, periods of harvesting and periods of rest.

The movement is still forward, but it isn’t linear.

Your month: working with the Moon

The same principle can be brought into your monthly planning through the lunar cycle. The Moon gives us another rhythm to work with, moving through phases of darkness, emergence, illumination, release and renewal. Only here rhythm is a smaller, monthly cycle of 28 days. The New Moon can become a natural monthly reset, giving you an opportunity to pause, reflect on where you are and consider what you want to focus your energy on during the next few weeks. The waxing Moon can then support a period of building and taking action, with the First Quarter offering a useful point to commit, make decisions and move things forward.

As the Moon moves towards fullness, you can allow yourself to become more visible, expressive and outward-facing, bringing energy to the things you have been developing. Then, as the Moon begins to wane, the emphasis can gradually shift. Instead of continuing to add more, you can begin to ask what needs completing, clearing, releasing or simplifying.

The final part of the cycle, around the waning crescent and dark Moon, can become a quieter space for rest, reflection and replenishment before you begin again. This doesn’t mean that you have to stop working every time the Moon changes phase, or that you can only launch something during a particular part of the lunar cycle.

It is simply another layer of awareness.

Instead of looking at your calendar and seeing a collection of empty boxes that need filling, you begin to see the month as having movement and rhythm. And that can change the way you approach your plans.

Your week: working with your capacity

This is where I think cyclical planning becomes particularly practical, because it asks you to stop assuming that you have the same amount of energy available every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. This is your immediate rhythm, where instead of creating your to-do list and then trying to force yourself to complete it regardless of how you feel, you can begin by checking in with your capacity.

How much energy do I actually have this week?

What is genuinely important?

What can wait?

What needs more space?

Where do I need recovery?

This doesn’t mean allowing yourself to avoid anything uncomfortable or only doing things when you feel motivated. Capacity isn’t the same as motivation. Sometimes something needs to happen even when you don’t particularly feel like doing it. But knowing your capacity allows you to plan realistically rather than creating a huge list based on an imaginary version of yourself who has unlimited time, energy and focus.

Maybe you have a week with lots of meetings, social commitments or family responsibilities.

Maybe you have slept badly.

Maybe you are coming out of an intense period and need some breathing space.

Maybe you have a week where your energy is high, and you feel ready to create, build and get things moving.

Those different weeks require different approaches, that shouldn’t make you feel like a failure, and it’s certainly not inconsistency. It’s flexibility, adaptability. It’s being human.

Your days: energy before the to-do list

Living in rhythm can become even simpler when you bring it into your day. Rather than immediately looking at everything you need to accomplish, you can begin by checking in with yourself.

How do I feel today?

What is my energy like?

What does my body need?

What is the one thing that matters most?

What kind of work suits the capacity I have available?

This is where the idea of energy before the to-do list becomes so important. A list doesn’t know how you feel; a calendar doesn’t know whether you have capacity. Your productivity system doesn’t know whether you are stretched too thin. You do. And learning to pay attention to those signals gives you information that a traditional planning system simply cannot provide.

Some days might be expansive and creative, and you might have the capacity to write, plan, create, exercise, socialise and tackle the things you’ve been putting off. Other days might need to be quieter. You still move your work forwards, but through smaller actions, simpler tasks and more space between them. Both kinds of days count.

Rhythm doesn’t mean doing less

One of the biggest misconceptions about this approach is that working with your rhythms means becoming less ambitious.

I don’t believe that it does. In fact, I think it can create a much more sustainable relationship with ambition.

When you stop expecting yourself to be in a constant state of maximum output, you create more space for the periods when you do have energy to build, create and expand. Taking time off actually makes you MORE creative, passionate, motivated and most importantly happier.

Think about nature. A tree doesn’t produce leaves, flowers and fruit continuously throughout the year, there are periods of growth and periods of dormancy. Neither is more important than the other. The rest is part of the growth. The retreat is part of the expansion.

The clearing is part of the creating. The pause is part of the movement.

And when we begin to understand our own lives in the same way, rest stops feeling like something we have to earn after we have exhausted ourselves. It becomes part of the process.

A different way to think about your goals

This is also why I don’t think cyclical living means abandoning goals. It means changing the relationship you have with them. Instead of setting a goal once and then expecting yourself to pursue it relentlessly for twelve months, you can allow your goals to move through different phases.

There might be a period when you are actively working towards something. Then a period when you are refining it. A period when you step back and assess. A period when you realise that something you wanted six months ago no longer matters in quite the same way. And a period when a completely new idea begins to emerge.

Your goals are allowed to evolve because you are allowed to evolve.

The version of you who set a goal in January may not be the same person sitting at your desk in September. That doesn’t mean you have failed. It means you’ve lived another nine months of your life. Your circumstances have changed. You’ve learned things. Your priorities may have shifted. Something that once felt incredibly important may now feel strangely irrelevant, while something you couldn’t have anticipated has become central to your life.

A cyclical approach leaves room for that.

Creating your own seasonal rhythm

Ultimately, living your year in rhythm isn’t about following a rigid set of rules; it isn’t about making your life another productivity system, or about adding twenty more things to track in your planner. And it certainly isn’t about feeling guilty because you didn’t perfectly align your life with the season, the Moon or some predetermined energetic framework.

The purpose of working with rhythm is to become more connected to yourself.

To notice.

To listen.

To respond.

To understand that your capacity isn’t fixed and that your needs aren’t inconvenient.

You can use the seasons as a framework for understanding the larger movement of your year, the Moon as a way of creating monthly moments of reflection and renewal, and your own energy and capacity as the foundation for deciding what each week and day actually needs.

You can still have goals. You can still want more. You can still be ambitious, build something meaningful, make money, grow your business, create art, change your life and pursue the things that matter to you.

But you don’t have to sacrifice your health, your joy, your creativity or your presence in your life in order to do it. The goal isn’t to squeeze more out of yourself. The goal is to create a life that has enough space for you to actually live it.

That is what living your year in rhythm means to me.

It is choosing to work with the natural movement of your life rather than constantly fighting against it, understanding that there will be seasons for action and seasons for rest, moments for beginning and moments for finishing, periods of expansion and periods of retreat.

And rather than seeing those changes as obstacles to your progress, you begin to see them as the rhythm that makes sustainable progress possible, because your life was never meant to be lived at the same pace all year round.

A year that works with you, rather than against you

Your year, held by the seasons

The 2027 Aligned Life Planner is now available to pre-order, and I created it to help you move through the year with a little more awareness, intention and connection to the natural rhythms that are already happening around you.

If any of this post has resonated with you then perhaps your next year doesn’t need to be more productive; it simply needs to feel more aligned with the way you actually want to live.

The planner brings the bigger picture of the year into the practical rhythm of your everyday life, so that alongside your appointments, commitments, plans and to-do lists, you can see the Moon phases, astrological seasons and seasonal energy that you’re moving through.

Instead of simply opening a new month and thinking, “Right, what do I need to get done?”, you have the opportunity to pause and consider what this particular point in the year is bringing with it, what you want to focus on, what your energy is asking of you and how you might work with the opportunities available to you.

These pages aren’t simply somewhere to record what is happening; they become a place to orientate yourself before you begin.

This is what makes the 2027 Aligned Life Planner different from simply buying another planner for the new year.

It gives you the practical structure you need to organise your days, weeks and months, but it also gives you a reason to lift your head up from the to-do list and notice the bigger rhythm you’re moving through.

The seasons hold the year, giving you a wider sense of where you are within the cycle and what that particular point in the year might invite you towards. The Moon gives you another cycle to notice, while astrology offers a way of understanding some of the themes moving through each month. Your intentions help you decide where you want your energy to go, and your weekly and daily planning then brings all of that into the reality of your everyday life.

You don’t have to completely change the way you live, become perfectly seasonal or abandon your calendar, your career, your responsibilities or all of the things that make up your existing life.

You simply begin to notice what is already there.

You begin to notice the season you’re moving through, the changing phases of the Moon and the way your own energy and capacity shifts alongside everything else. You begin to notice what matters to you, what needs your attention and what perhaps doesn’t need quite so much of it anymore.

And then, rather than planning your life separately from all of that, you begin to plan with what you notice.

So rather than entering another year with a list of everything you think you should accomplish, perhaps you can enter 2027 with a little more space to consider what you actually want this year to hold, where you want your energy to go, what you are ready to grow and what you are ready to release, while also allowing yourself to recognise that there will be times when what you need most is not another goal or another push forward, but some space to pause, replenish and simply be where you are.

Because your year doesn’t need to be a straight line from January to December.

It can have seasons.

It can have rhythms.

It can have moments of action and moments of rest, periods of expansion and periods of retreat, times when you are building something new and times when you are gathering yourself before the next chapter begins.

The 2027 Aligned Life Planner is here to help you make space for all of it.

Your year, held by the seasons.

FIND OUT MORE + PRE-ORDER YOUR 2027 ALIGNED LIFE PLANNER

Because perhaps your next year doesn’t need to be more productive.

Perhaps it simply needs to feel more aligned with the way you actually want to live.