Who this is for
A change with a lot of moving parts and a real date attached — emigrating, moving house, having a child, leaving a long career, going back to study full time. The decision is broadly made. What remains is that the change touches everything at once, and the parts have dependencies you will otherwise discover in the worst possible order.
This template is a sequencing instrument. Unlike a decision map, it assumes you are going ahead; the risk it manages is not choosing wrongly but doing things in an order that costs you.
The branches
What must happen before anything else can. The gating items. A visa, a sale, an acceptance, a notice period, a signature. Everything downstream waits on these and they usually have the longest lead times, so they belong at the front regardless of how uninteresting they are. Sub-branches: what each actually requires; how long it realistically takes; what happens if it is refused or delayed.
Money through the transition. Not your long-term finances — the trough. What is spent before anything comes back, what overlaps (two rents, two sets of bills), what buffer would let a two-month delay be survivable rather than a crisis. Almost every major change costs more in the middle than in total.
What I am ending. Changes get planned as arrivals and executed as departures. Notice to give, things to cancel, handovers, goodbyes, possessions to dispose of. This branch is dull, has real lead times, and is where most of the last-fortnight panic originates.
The people affected. Who else is inside this decision and what do they need — information, a say, warning, reassurance. Includes the conversations you are dreading, which have a way of slipping until they become worse than they needed to be.
The first month afterwards. Planned in advance, because judgment in that month is unreliable. Where you sleep, what you eat, who you know, what is fixed in the week. The most common failure of a big change is treating the arrival as the finish line and having nothing structured on the other side of it.
What I am not going to fix at the same time. Explicitly. A big change makes everything feel available for revision — new city, so also new fitness regime, new career, new social circle. Attempting several at once is how the change itself gets destabilised. Name what waits.
What would tell me this is going wrong. Not for reversing the decision — for noticing early. A date passing, money crossing a line, a permission not arriving. Set the tripwires now, while you can think clearly about them.
How to use it
Import it, mark the gating branch as Focus, and resist the pull of the interesting branches. Long lead-time items are almost always boring, and they determine whether everything else is possible.
Dependencies matter more in this map than in any other. Draw the relationship lines — most of the value is in discovering that three things you assumed were parallel are actually in sequence.
Real Deadlines genuinely exist here: submission dates, notice periods, completion dates. Use them, and keep everything else as Aim dates so the fixed ones stay visible.
What to add once it is yours
Put the real dates, real amounts, real names in. A change of this size cannot be planned in the abstract, and a generic version of this map will not surface the dependency that matters.
Attach Proof to the gating items especially — the submitted application, the signed document, the confirmed date. During a long transition that record is what lets you see progress when the change itself still feels months away.
Signs it is working
- The long lead-time items are moving first
- You know the size of the financial trough, not just the total
- The endings have dates on them
- Something is planned for the first month afterwards
- You have named what you are not fixing simultaneously
Signs it is not
- The exciting branches are full and the gating branch is empty
- The dependency lines have not been drawn
- Money is planned as a total rather than as a trough
- Three other life changes have attached themselves to this one