Martin Hähnel

Lebenszyklus: The Basic Idea

Changelog

  • 2025-07-27 - This post - that was a draft for a while - ended up in the wrong folder and therefore has a slightly confusing permalink: Even though it was "written" on 2025-07-27 it has the permalink: "/2025/07/26/lebenszyklus-the-basic-idea/". So to rectify this, I ended up changing the created at date. So it would fit with the permalink. But - between us - this post was first published on 2025-07-27.

Intro

The core idea is simple: we all go through recurring cycles in our lives. Some of these are very general, while others are highly specific to each of us. The Lebenszyklus system (Lebenszyklus is German for "life cycle") aims to become more aware of these cycles and to do more than merely live through them: to sustainably capture the lessons learned and, by understanding the recurrence of these cycles, shape and engage with them more actively.

In practical terms, setting up a Lebenszyklus system works as follows:

  1. Identify cycles that are meaningful to you
  2. Equip them with planning and reflection rituals
  3. Implement a meta-reflection framework to ensure the system stays "alive"

You could do this in all kinds of ways. I personally use a notes system powered by Obsidian and a bunch of plugins to do so.

Identify Cycles That Are Meaningful to You

Days, weeks, months, quarters, years - as well as seasons, mornings, weekends, birthdays, and so on - these are all examples of "cycles" that we all go through. Not all of these cycles are equally important to everyone, and we don't need to account for all of them in our system. But some cycles are ones we experience more consciously than others. Those are the ones that are most relevant to our experience of being alive.

An example from my own life: weeks are more meaningful to me than months. I often live in terms of the upcoming week or reflect on past or future time in weekly segments. Months are harder for me to grasp. I do receive my salary monthly and pay my rent and many other things on a monthly basis, but I still very much operate in a weekly mode.

That's not to say I don't also experience living through days or months! My weeks are very much made up of days - and the day cycle is probably the second most important cycle in my life. But I do experience them mostly in relation to the week. A week consists of a workweek (made up of workdays), which begins on Monday and ends on Friday, and a weekend that starts Friday evening. There is a lot more to a week cycle than its dictionary definition and we only have scratched the surface here.

Equip Your Cycles with Planning and Reflection Rituals

My weeks are shaped by three planning and reflection rituals:

• Monday • Weekly Wrap-Up - This is where I look back on the previous week's daily notes and other sources of information and reflect on what stood out to me and what I want to capture. This gives me weekly notes, which preserve meaningful moments or insights. • Weekly Planning - Here, I take about half an hour to write about my plans for the week. I ask myself a few guiding questions, such as: • What's coming up this week? • What's important work-wise? • What are the 3 most important outcomes that would make this week a success? • Friday • Weekly Review - Again, I take around 30 minutes to reflect on how the week went and ask myself: • What went well? • What did I learn? • How did I do on the 3 most important goals?

As you can see these rituals are most often - at least in my case - time-boxed writing prompts (although some parts of my review templates ask me to update my kanban board which I use to keep up with my tasks, or a spreadsheet that graphs my subjective experience - my "Wheel Of Life".).

Implement a Meta-Reflection Framework to Ensure the System Stays "Alive"

Thinking about the upcoming week and reflecting on how things went is all well and good. But to make sure the system doesn't just mindlessly repeat paths you once set out on - paths by the way that may no longer resonate with your current sense of meaning - it's important to regularly examine the system itself for signs of (missing) resonance.

In my experience, it's very difficult to prescribe a fixed cadence for this. For example, if I decided to examine the "aliveness" of my system every quarter, I'd probably soon discover that a system which is already dead won't motivate me to actually perform such a review when it would've been time to do so.

That's why I suggest asking yourself questions like these - both in conventional and unconventional ways more or less all the time:

• Is the system still alive? • Does it still resonate with me? • Does it add value? • Why do I feel resistance to keeping the system alive? • Why do I want to have a system like this in the first place - or any system at all - and why am I doing so little to maintain it?

The purpose of this is to find out whether the system still supports you - or whether it has become too sluggish or no longer helpful, in a word: dead.

A conventional way to ask these questions is by including a question like this into one of your cycle rituals. While reflecting about how the week went, ask yourself if the system needs any adjusting.

An unconventional way may be to become aware one night - when in theory you ought be trying to sleep - that the system is in the process of dying. And then actually following that intuition. That could mean to put on some clothes and go for a walk in the middle of the night while recording an audio log of this insight. Unconventional ways are by their nature not really something you plan for. But keeping an open mind and "giving in" to these moments is very important for any system that is more than just lifeless.

I think it's reasonable for a system to shift and change quite often. Things are added, others are removed and just as the cycles themselves are the same and always slightly different, the system is, too - at least if it is alive.

Conclusion

What makes the Lebenszyklus system unique is its focus on resonance. As the name suggests, it embraces the fact that we all move through short- and long-term cycles that differ in meaning and importance from person to person. By equipping the cycles that matter to us with fitting planning and reflection rituals, we can extend our intentions beyond just the next cycle and preserve the lessons we've learned - enabling us to lead a more individually meaningful, that is, more resonant life.