Planning around a life event
To plan around a major life event — a move, a new baby, a new job, an illness — cut your active commitments down to three and let Composed handle prep for only those. On an iPhone running iOS, you keep using voice input so Apple’s Speech framework captures plans even amid the chaos, but you deliberately stop planning everything else. A life event isn’t a drift to recover from later; it’s a window where the Calm Planning Method should yield to the thing that’s actually happening, and forcing the full system through it is how people end up resenting both.
This is the big drift, and it’s different in kind from the others. The small drift was one missed appointment. The medium drift was a busy week you restart in fifteen minutes. A life event is neither of those — it’s a stretch where the old plan simply doesn’t apply, and the right move is to shrink the system on purpose rather than fight to maintain it.
What counts as a life event
A life event is a discrete, identifiable disruption that reorders your weeks — not just any hard stretch. The distinction matters, because if “life event” means “anytime things are busy,” then it means nothing and you’ll never invoke it. The real list is short and concrete: a move, a new baby, a new job, a serious illness in the family, a death, a separation. Each one rewrites the calendar for a defined window, and each one earns the radical reduction.
What does not count: a hectic week, a big work deadline, the holidays, a vacation. Those are intense but they’re inside normal life, and the restart protocol handles them. The test is whether the event has reordered your priorities, not just filled your time. The week you moved across the state with a toddler — boxes in the hallway, no idea which one had the coffee maker — that reordered everything; the week of a tough product launch just filled the hours. The first gets the life-event treatment. The second gets a normal busy week.
A life event isn’t a planning emergency. It’s permission to plan less, on purpose, for as long as the event lasts.
Naming it as a life event is itself part of the method, because the naming is what authorizes the reduction. Without it, you’ll try to run your full pre-baby planning practice through the first month of the baby’s life, and the gap between what you’re attempting and what’s possible becomes one more source of the kind of anxiety the whole method exists to remove.
The radical reduction
The radical reduction means cutting to three active commitments and consciously dropping the rest until the event passes. Not three commitments per day — three, total, that you’re actually tracking and preparing for during the window. Everything else either doesn’t happen, gets handled by someone else, or waits.
Three is the number because it’s small enough to hold in a depleted brain and large enough to cover what genuinely can’t slip. During a move, the three might be: the closing appointment, the kid’s first day at the new school, and the utility-transfer date. During a new-baby month: the pediatrician visits, the one work obligation you couldn’t defer, and a recurring grocery delivery. Everything outside the three gets dropped without ceremony — the book club, the dentist cleaning, the “we should have them over” plan. They’ll come back. Right now they’re noise.
The reduction is freeing precisely because it’s explicit. You’re not failing to plan the other things; you’ve decided not to, which is a completely different feeling. The dropped commitments aren’t a backlog accruing guilt — they’re consciously parked, and parking is a choice, not a failure.
The prep layer during chaos
During chaos, keep the AI prep layer for your three commitments and turn off the rest of your planning attention. This is where Composed earns its keep in a life event: for those three things, you still want to show up prepared, and the AI prep tasks do the remembering you don’t have the bandwidth for. “Closing appointment Thursday” still generates “bring the cashier’s check and your ID,” even when you’re running on four hours of sleep and can’t be trusted to remember it yourself.
That’s the whole reason to keep three commitments in the system rather than zero. A life event doesn’t mean abandon planning entirely — it means concentrate it. The prep layer for three events is light enough to maintain in the worst weeks and valuable enough that you’d genuinely regret showing up to the closing without the check. Let the readiness scores for those three be the only readiness you track. Ignore everything else’s preparation, because everything else is parked.
Voice-only mode
Voice-only mode is for the stretches where you can’t think well enough to type — and during a real life event, those stretches are most of it. The move here is to drop to capture-only: when something for one of your three commitments surfaces, you speak it into voice input and you do nothing else. No reviewing, no organizing, no planning ahead. Just say it and let it be held.
This matters because typing requires a kind of composed attention that a life event takes away. Standing in a hospital corridor, or surrounded by half-packed boxes, you can speak “pediatrician follow-up next Tuesday at 10” far more reliably than you can find a form and fill it in correctly. Voice survives conditions that typing doesn’t, which is exactly when you need capture to still work. The full version of this floor — capture-only with everything else switched off — is the same one the next chapter builds on for recovery.
Returning to normal planning
Returning to normal planning is a gradient, not a switch you flip the day the event ends. The move is to let commitments back in one at a time as bandwidth returns, the same way you’d reintroduce them after the fifteen-minute restart — not to wake up one Monday and resume your full pre-event practice all at once.
So you go from three commitments to four when four feels manageable. Then the recurring chores come back. Then the social plans. There’s no deadline on the return, and rushing it just causes a fresh drift. The boxes-unpacked, baby-sleeping-through-the-night, settled-into-the-new-role moment isn’t a starting gun — it’s permission to add the fourth thing, and then later the fifth, at whatever pace your attention actually recovers.
Some life events leave you genuinely depleted on the other side, and resuming “normal” planning isn’t just a matter of bandwidth returning — the depletion itself is the thing to plan around. That’s burnout, and rebuilding a planning practice after it is the final, structural drift.
Next: Planning after burnout — how to rebuild a planning practice after burnout without re-creating the conditions that caused it.