I work for this really interesting company that helps make the free and open source operating system Ubuntu. I actually work on a slightly separate project that provides online services for our users and customers.

We work on a six month cadence, so every six months a new version comes out making Ubuntu better. These versions have codenamed while they're in development. The current version is codenamed Maverick Meerkat. Our fearless leader, founder and all around head dude Mark Shuttleworth comes up with these names, but he only announces them a few weeks before that version goes into development.

What I really like about this is that whenever my team is talking about a piece of work, it's almost always prefaced by the version. For instance we've going to be doing some really neat stuff with your music in the next version, but we'll only have time to do part of the work, so I might say, "We'll have feature A for Maverick, but we'll need to wait until Maverick +1 for feature B".

Maverick +1 refers to the release that will come after the currently in development version. Maverick is what we're working on now and since we don't know the name of the next release, we specify the next release simply by saying, "after Maverick + 1".

If you are tracking, we basically know what we're working on right now, we have a vague idea of what we'll work on for the next cycle, and anything further than a year away goes into the fuzzy idea of what might be the future.

What this does is keep me focused on what we're creating right now, while still giving me small glimpses into our future. It's a great way to let the future sort of take care of itself, and remove most of the guess work from our planning. As 37 Signals so often says, plans are really guesses anyway, right?