Name every cycle before it starts, using a theme with enough entries to keep going for years. A named block of time has edges. "Before Medellín" and "next cycle" become units people actually talk in, which "Q3" never manages. The name is not decoration. It is what turns a stretch of calendar into something with a beginning and, more importantly, an end.
Where the habit came from
A friend at Basecamp told me their team named each cycle after different wars.
I had already been doing a version of this to my years. Over five years before I wrote the book I started giving each coming year a name, along with a list of things I wanted to do in it. Not big things. Small ones that made me happy: score a goal in hockey, write a new song, go on a boat.
The idea underneath both is the same. You have the opportunity to write your own future rather than receive it.
So when I brought cycles to my team, naming them was obvious.
What I have actually used
I was deep on Hamilton at the time, so the first full year ran on US presidents and founders.
You can see the theme switch. My team moved into travel and tourism, so cycle names became cities around the world, and I have not gone back since. Six a year, one per two-month block, named years ahead.
The theme found a second job inside the product. We pushed software updates at the end of every cycle, and each update changed the login screen image to a photo of that cycle's city. The rhythm became something customers could see without anyone explaining it to them.
Why a name does work that a number does not
"Q3" is a coordinate. It tells you where you are on a grid someone else drew.
"Marrakesh" is a thing. It has a start, an end, a feel, and a set of work that belongs to it. When someone says a task will not make Marrakesh, everyone in the room understands both the deadline and the consequence without checking a calendar.
That matters more than it sounds, because the hardest part of running work in cycles is deciding what does not fit. Deferral is much easier when there is somewhere specific to defer to. "Let's put that in Berlin" is a decision. "Let's do that later" is an avoidance.
How to pick your theme
Three requirements, and only three.
- Long enough to last. You need six a year, indefinitely. Cities, mountains, rivers, composers, constellations, cocktails. Anything with more entries than you will ever need.
- Meaningful to you or the organization. Ours mapped to the industry we served. Yours might map to where your customers are, or to something the founders genuinely care about.
- Orderable. Alphabetical, geographic, chronological, whatever. You want it obvious what comes next so naming never becomes a meeting.
Then give it some personality. Give it some flair. This is one of the very few parts of running a company that is allowed to just be fun.
Name several in advance
Do not name only the cycle you are in.
Naming the next several before they start is what makes the always-open next sheet useful. During a cycle, things surface constantly that clearly are not happening now. If the next block of time already has a name and a sheet, that item has somewhere to go the moment it appears, instead of living in your head until you forget it.
A big part of organization is simply having a place to put things. Naming cycles ahead creates the places.
A note on whether this is silly
It is a little silly, and it works anyway.
I am not going to claim naming a cycle improves throughput by some percentage, because I have no way to measure that and neither does anyone selling you a framework. What I can tell you is that within one cycle my team was using the names unprompted, in Slack, in client calls, in conversations I was not part of. The vocabulary spread on its own.
Try it for two cycles. If nobody uses the name by the end of the second, you have lost ten minutes.
The whole method is in the guide to running your work in six-week cycles.