Plans
Plans
Biweekly planning cadence for Life Itself, with weekly check-ins and optional daily standups.
No fixed day yet. First meeting: Monday 13 April 2026. Thursdays may work well going forward so Matthew can join, but not decided.
How Biweekly Planning Works
A normal biweekly meeting has two inputs:
- Prioritised backlog — per initiative or area (e.g. farmhouse, strategy). Look at what's there, pick what to work on next.
- Strategic plan — when doing bigger-picture decisions, pull from the annual/quarterly plan to check priorities are aligned.
The meeting then reviews progress, updates the backlog, and sets focus for the next two weeks.
Current Status of Inputs
| Input | Status |
|---|---|
| Strategic plan | ~60-70% done. Exists but not finished. Walkthrough with Armel and Matthew happened in recent hangout — useful as briefing. Key task: pull that and finalise. |
| Prioritised backlogs | Not set up. No systematic per-initiative or per-area backlogs exist yet. Setting these up (and noting where they live) is a near-term priority. |
Situation
Life Itself has had regular biweekly planning meetings many times over its history. Most recently, these ran every two weeks on Thursday afternoons until mid-November 2024. They stopped when the team reorganised and Rufus and Sylvie travelled to Taiwan in mid-December 2024. Previous cadences included GitHub issues for tracking and quarterly plans.
The team — particularly Armel and Matthew — are more bought-in to structured planning than before.
Complication
The cadence has lapsed and needs restarting from scratch. Beyond logistics, there is a deeper question about how to structure planning: traditional quarterly plans require significant effort to create well and can feel rigid when circumstances shift. The tension is between a long-term strategic plan (quarterly milestones, structured roadmap) and a lighter shaping-and-shipping model (six-week cycles, less long-term lock-in, more adaptability).
Question
What planning cadence should we adopt — and at what level of strategic structure? Do we run full quarterly plans with a long-term strategic vision, or do we adopt a shaping/shipping model with shorter cycles and more flexibility?
Hypothesis
Start simple: biweekly planning meetings, build the habit, then adjust. Don't try to layer in a full quarterly plan immediately. Get the rhythm working first, then decide whether to add more structure or move toward a shaping model based on what we learn.