It’s been over a month since the last time I posted on the garden. Between being sick, Christmas Holidays, family, and traveling, I’ve left the garden unattended… And, although I’ve missed it, it’s hard to come back to it. An actual garden would have grown weeds and beared fruits, and it would demand immediate attention, but this digital garden, without me, is simply quiet and unchanged. So I come back and feel lost, like “Alright… where was I?”
I have also taken a three-week break from design and creating in general, during which I also barely wrote anything, not even to write down thoughts, take notes on things, or understand emotions. All that makes it even more difficult to come back to the keyboard. It’s now been around a week since I got back to my usual routine, and that’s how much it’s taken me to come back to the garden.
So this post is, I guess, a bridge from pause to continuation. Because I’m not sure where I’d continue if I just did so from nothing, it would be too big of a jump. I need a bridge first, something to get me from one side to the other and build momentum.
But isn’t it great how incredibly adaptable a digital garden is? Maybe this post won’t fit into anything I’ve wrote about before, but so what? I’ll create its tags and it will make its corner in the garden.
But I don’t just want to write about coming back.
This past week I found a Youtube video by Jess (JashiiCorrin) explaining an alternative to monthly planning, which she calls cyclic planning. The point is that because months are irregular in length and asynchronous to the days of the week, it’s difficult to plan things by month. Cyclic planning works by dividing the year by quarters of 13 weeks, which are divided by 3 cycles + a week, which Jess calls a reset week. This way, every cycle has 4 exact weeks.
I’ve never really done monthly planning, and I realize that this might be the reason. Jess says this method helps her avoid time blindness, and I can see why. If I plan by week, it doesn’t fit with the month, and that’s quite annoying.
Although I’m not really someone who does monthly or quarterly reviews, which this method is great for, I still think that seeing time like this can benefit me too. When I was getting my degree, I often printed out a simple calendar for the next 4 months so I could see all my semester’s due dates at a glance, together with other plans like clients or trips. So last week, I created something similar, with a cycles instead of months, and printed out my first quarter of 2026, which started last Monday, the 5th of January and will end the 5th of April, on a Sunday.
I had the idea to organize medium-sized personal projects by cycles, so that it’s easier for me to actually carry out the ideas I have by allocating them to a specific block of time. But for now, I’m using the calendar to get familiar with this new invisible structure and see the quarter at the glance again.
