Career HIIT: Why 5-year plans no longer work for creatives and what to do instead

Five-year plans were built for a more predictable version of work that wasn’t shaped by AI, messy freelance careers and constant change. Now, a growing number of creatives are shifting to 12-week cycles instead: shorter, focused resets that build momentum without locking you into the wrong path. Here’s how “career HIIT” works, and how to make it work for you.

The five-year plan is irrelevant

The five-year plan didn’t exactly die. It just stopped being useful.

It belonged to a version of work that was more linear and easier to map. You picked a lane, stayed in it, and trusted that time plus effort would get you somewhere you wanted to be. That logic is harder to apply now because, as we well know, the jobs market is shifting in real time. Roles are being rewritten by AI and more creatives are piecing together careers across freelance, short-term contracts and self-initiated work. Even “stability” looks different depending on the month.

Planning five years ahead in this context can feel like guesswork more than ambition. What’s the point?

A new kind of career plan

A shorter planning cycle makes more sense. Something structured enough to build momentum, flexible enough to respond to change. Think of it as Career HIIT (we’re just sorry we can’t promise you a six-pack at the end of it).

High-Intensity Interval Training works because it alternates focus and recovery. Short bursts of effort, clear targets, regular reassessment. You know what you’re working on, for how long and why. Then you pause, recalibrate and go again.

The creative career HIIT plan

Applied to a creative career, a HIIT session should happen once every 12 weeks or so and follow the same rhythm (just with fewer burpees!)

Start with the warm-up: an honest audit. Where are you actually at? And we don’t mean the LinkedIn version, but the reality. Which skills are sharp, which ones are lagging a bit? Assess what kind of work you’re getting versus the work you want. If your portfolio hasn’t changed in a year, that’s useful information. If you’re busy but not feeling like you’re progressing, that’s good to know too.

Then comes the first sprint. Pick one or two priorities that would meaningfully move things forward over the next three months. Keep it tight. Build a stronger portfolio. Learn a piece of software that keeps appearing in job descriptions. Shift your network from passive scrolling to actual conversations. These are your intervals.

The work phase is where consistency matters more than intensity. In HIIT, you don’t sprint once and call it done. You repeat the effort in structured bursts. Career-wise, that might mean sending two thoughtful emails a week, publishing one piece of work every fortnight or dedicating fixed hours to developing a new skill. These short bursts can be really effective.

Rest and review are part of the method, not a reward for finishing it. At the halfway point in the 12-week cycle, take stock. What’s landing? What’s getting ignored? If something isn’t working, you adjust the next sprint. There’s no benefit in pushing through a plan that you’re already exhausted by.

At the end of 12 weeks, you’ve created a contained HIIT cycle. You can measure progress without having to zoom out to an abstract future. You’ve tested ideas, built something tangible and gathered evidence about what works for you.

Then you reset and go again.

Why it works

For emerging creatives, this approach holds both the long and short term at once. You’re still building towards a bigger direction, but through a series of focused, responsive cycles rather than a single fixed plan. It makes space for ambition without requiring certainty, which, let’s face it, is getting harder and harder to come by.

The five-year plan asks you to predict who you’ll be “one day”. Career HIIT assumes you’ll change and the world will change and builds around that. The fact is, you won’t have all the answers to the question of where or who you’ll be at some imagined point in the future. But this method can help you find your direction while you’re moving.