Big history might seem like one continuous sequence of events, but despite our experience of time as a continuum, breaking it into segments makes it more “manageable” for psychological, educational, research, and discussion purposes. Books on big history, such as the 2014 textbook “Big History: Between Nothing and Everything” by David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin, along with several scholarly papers, often divide the time continuum into periods. However, unlike disciplines such as geology, big history lacks broadly agreed-upon conventions for periodization. Fred Spier, a pioneer in big history, critiqued Christian's “thresholds” approach to periodization in a recent Journal of Big History paper, “Thresholds of Big History—A Critical Review” (Vol 5, No. 1), expressing skepticism about periodization itself. Nonetheless, we believe that establishing a system of periodization is a worthwhile endeavor, ideally undertaken by a “working group” of big history scholars. We propose a general framework for dividing big history into time periods and anticipate some major challenges in developing a coherent periodization schema. To better illustrate these challenges, we will conclude with a brief analysis of three potential big history “events” that could be used to mark the boundaries between different time periods.