My Cycle Planner V. 1

In the past few months I’ve written 10 digital transformation plans for a wide variety of Canadian businesses. It’s a careful process of distilling the sum total of the internet into a clear plan. The plans impact millions of dollars of deployed capital, but I’m often left with a question; how do you introduce technological solutions in a way that addresses human problems??

The incredible value of digital technology really comes from its capacity to connect. Connect ideas and teams together, so they can create a bigger impact on other levels within the organization.?As I’m working with founders, and on myself, I build my mental models around cycles of connection. The planner shown below is a tool to organize those cycles

Sociologists and front-line care workers will tell you that the opposite to addiction is not sobriety; but connection. So it is fitting that the Canadian government allocated 4.3 billion to support small businesses in their journey of digital integration. Addiction creates exponential costs in society, and small businesses are the most exponential drivers of value. They create powerful leverage upon each other.?

As I explored in the last article, life is fundamentally about collaboration. It is the process of determining what should be remembered by future generations. The tricky thing about that process is how to do it without crossing the boundaries of each organism (more about that in my second article). Individual organisms need to maintain their boundaries in order to maximize the memory and transference potential.

What is a language to describe the process of determining what should be remembered, without ]crossing the boundaries that are fundamental to memory? I believe the answer lies in the language of cycles. In tech circles it’s not uncommon to say to someone, “Do you have the cycles for ____,” meaning “do you have the time and energy to work on ____.” Computers compute based on processing cycles, and programmers have adopted them to refer to their own capacity to manage workload.?

Yet cycles are present in nature, and always have been. We measure years by cycles around the sun, months by the moon’s cycles around us and days by rotations of the earth. Some determine happiness by how many cycles they’ve had of getting laid, and others determine it by the cycles of their last workout. The “oldest” living animal is a shark that slows its cycles (growth, metabolism, sexual maturity) down to a snail's pace deep in the ocean; away from the radiation of the sun and closer to the center of earth’s mass.?

Habits are how some describe cycles. For me, the word habit? has a painful association. It carries with it the burden of arbitrary rules assigned for the maintenance of a hierarchical structure. Cycles are different, they are more like the rhythms that tie together your favorite song. They are as diverse as humans are. Each individual is its own organism with its own boundaries and shape.?

This cycle planner is a tool to find that shape; and maintain the cycles that get us there.* I’ll share more about the math I tried to incorporate into its design, and the patterns behind it in my next newsletter. It’s not a habit tracker, it is an exploratory tool to feel into a new “shape” of your identity, remembering the cycles that will get you there.?