Creating an Agreement with Your Year

In February, I took some time to map out what my year might look like quarter by quarter. I start in Feb because as previously discussed, January was never meant to count as a real month. 

Here's what I mean by quarterly planning. When you look at a whole year at once, it quickly becomes overwhelming and falls apart fast. But a quarter? 3 months? That’s plannable. 

Once you break the year down and look at it in quarters, you’ll start to see patterns. You’ll observe themes. Times of buckling down and times of loosening your grip.

Let’s look at this in practice. 

When I did my planning this year, I came up with something that looked like this:

Q1: Jan to Mar. Focus: coaching business.

Jan: Reset. Since this is not really a month we can look at it as the time for getting your ducks in a row. Organizing your life, establishing habits, making goals, doing your year planning (I love Year Compass).

Feb: Start. If you are an entrepreneur this is when you’d have your first income and client goals. If you are a creative, you’d dig into your practice (for me that’s writing). If you are an employee, you start working towards your career goals. If you are all of those and more, you move the needle forward in each category. If this sounds complicated, it is! That’s why I get paid the big bucks to help women tame the chaos of their lives. But this isn’t a sales pitch, so I digress. 

Mar: Travel. Wait, what? Yup, that’s right. You are not one-dimensional. You are a universe of roles and facets. If an annual plan is going to be sustainable it must include all parts of you. My daughter was off for nearly four weeks between March and April and I needed to be realistic about what that offered for me. Was it focused work time? No. Book writing? Nope. Spacious time to myself? Not a chance. But it was a beautiful adventure of travel with my 9-year old. And since I did my quarterly plan, I factored that in. No guilt. No shame. No “I should be…”

So when I backed up and looked at Q1 I noticed that I had a light (March), medium (January), and heavy (February) month. What do I mean by that? I mean that in Feb, my daughter is in school fulltime with no breaks. I have full bandwidth. I can actually work. That's my buckle-down month. Jan I can do some of that, but since I’m just ramping up the year, I won’t have a lot of pressure on myself. And March will only afford me the lightest of self-focused opportunities. 

As I proceeded through the year, I found each quarter followed the same pattern. I have one month that is really, solidly mine, and two others that are either partial or full washes. For Q2 the first half of April is still spring break and then Izzy has another 10 days off in May if you can believe it, so that leaves June. It’s a Darla June love story.

Q3 July and August are travel and school break and seeing family and I never expect much productivity out of those months. September though? I’m making eyes at September.

Finally, Q4…December is not a month as previously disclosed. In October there is a full week off of school, but November is mine, all mine.  

When I see it that way, I stop punishing myself for the months that were never going to be full-throttle months. I stop setting expectations I was never going to meet.

That's actually the whole thing I’m getting at here and something that regularly comes up in coaching sessions: expectations versus agreements. What I'm doing now feels like creating agreements with my year. Not demanding things from it. Not pretending it's going to be a flat, even surface. Not expecting something while not articulating it. 

I’m agreeing with what it actually is.

The other piece is learning to trust that the slower months still contribute. The hanging out with friends, the travel with Izzy, the wandering, the hour in front of my computer—it's all related. Just because the focus shifts doesn't mean nothing's growing. It doesn't stop mattering just because it looks different.

And for the months where I know I'll have less time? I try to ask: what kind of work actually fits here? Maybe it's thinking about blog content rather than a big sales push. Maybe it's hosting something social that also creates connection and leads to clients. There's still momentum—it’s just dressed more casually.

It's like a birth plan. Plan it all out, and then be ready to throw it out the window.

The plan isn't the point. The plan just holds your foundational values while you figure out what you're actually working with.