PbyCj

At the beginning of the year, I did a survey. I’d actually been using something already built for a class project — I needed to do some research on a product — and the idea I landed on was a planner. So I put it out there to see who would participate.

Here’s my challenge with planners: I wouldn’t complete them. There’d be too much of a gap between where I started and where I picked back up. Months would go by, and then I’d have all these blank pages — time just elapsed, sitting there. It felt wasteful to keep a regular planner, especially for someone like me, where planning and organizing are still pretty new. That used to be genuinely hard to grasp, because I was a go-with-the-flow person. And for a while, that was fine. I was still making progress, still looking forward to things. But where I am in my life right now, I need structure. I need to write the vision down and make it plain. I need a space for that — I’m still working out what that looks like for me.

I still use the journal I published a couple years ago — it’s on Amazon, and it’s thick. I’m not even halfway through it, so I’ve probably got another six months in there. (I was tempted to buy a new journal yesterday. I didn’t, because I don’t need one.) What I’ve landed on is a combination of that journal and an undated calendar, and the undated part is what makes it work. I’m not boxed in — if I skip all of July, I’m not stuck dealing with a month of blank, dated pages. I just pick back up where I left off.

But somewhere in there I noticed something bigger about the calendar year itself. Twelve months, 365 or 366 days, weeks that don’t divide evenly into months that don’t divide evenly into years — who came up with that? Because I don’t think that’s how we operated from the beginning. Early humanity — I’m no expert — but early humanity ran more seasonally. And I started to realize the current structure just doesn’t work for me specifically. I’d feel out of place, out of touch, like I couldn’t fit into the normal way of doing life.

My first instinct was the old instinct: what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I fit in? Why can’t I be like everyone else who seems to just get this stuff? That was where my head went first. But then I started actually looking into it, and I found out Ethiopia runs on a completely different calendar system — one where every month starts on the same day and ends on the same day. Evenly structured, all the way through. And something in me just went: why can’t I do that?

Not “why can’t we” — why can’t I. There’s nothing in the rule book that says I personally can’t live on an even structure. The calendar can say whatever it wants about what month it is — my personal month can start on its own date. So I tried it.

I don’t go by months anymore. We’re in August right now, but I’m not personally in August. I’m in a wave. Today I’m in Wave Nine, Week One. Each wave corresponds to something specific about where I am in my process of life. The weeks rotate underneath that — four weeks to a wave, my week always starting on Monday, no matter what the actual date says. And within each wave, each week has its own job — whatever’s going to keep me on point for where I actually am, not where the calendar says I should be.

This is new territory for me. Nobody handed this to me or broke it down for me — I built it. And I’ve made more progress this year than I have in years. More breakthroughs on things I’ve been dealing with for a long time. Which makes me think I’m probably not the only person who could use this.

I’m still flushing out exactly what that looks like — who this would even be for. But it doesn’t have to be some big launch. It could just be a few, made available for whoever’s interested.

So — if this is you. If you’ve got a drawer full of half-used planners with a bunch of blank pages you gave up on, or the idea of living in waves and weeks instead of months just makes something in you go “yes, finally” — let me know, honestly. If I get like twenty people who are actually interested, I’ll go ahead and get this out to y’all.