Starting next week, I will share my reflections for 2021. As it is very long, I will probably publish it in 4 parts across two weeks. Seriously, part 1 has double the amount of words in this newsletter... But without losing more words, I will head into this week’s Rainy Sunday.
Working in seasons
When I look at the last six years, - since I started working - one theme that stands out is how my work seems to move in seasons.
I typically go through some significant work shift or change around the end of the year or the beginning of the next. A year ago, I was stepping out of the "just consume content"-mindset and started on my "streamline consumption to create something out of it"-mindset. I created interfaces between the tools I use to consume (books, email newsletters, websites, podcasts & YouTube videos), my note-taking tool Roam Research to automate to have everything I consume in one place.
The year before that, it was diving into Roam and starting to gather, summarize & tag my content consumption.
Before that, in different years, starting my "own way" without depending on somebody else, being part of starting my second startup, getting more involved in the family business...
Spring and into Summer are also often characterized by an intense focus on some project. Last year that was recovering our family business after the Covid lockdown. This year, I was finishing my main projects at Airbus and started writing consistently.
In the fall, I tend to be less productive. Not sure why. Maybe it’s a relic from school starting and me resisting doing anything related to school until the absolute last minute. Whatever the source, though, it tends to be a slower season.
I rather like this ebb and flow. Six to nine months of focused output, a period of rest, a period of reflection and planning, then another push forward. That also impacts my income as I earn more when I work more and I earn less when festive seasons are approaching.
What’s nice with those irregular income events, and a seasonal work pace is that it ends up enforcing some natural constraints and budgeting. If you make 15k in one month, then 7.5k the next one, you’ll probably live slightly above the 7k income. You won’t assume you’re going to have a 10k salary to live off of.
More advantages
It also makes it easier to work extremely intensely for periods, since you recognize they’re temporary. There were times this spring when I was going through such an insane amount of firefighting that I was getting headaches and tunnel vision from trying to resolve issues/risks. But it was temporary! And worth it.
That sprint of work could be extremely intense and stressful, but that’s probably fine if there’s a sufficient period of recovery afterward. We know how harmful stress is to our bodies, but I suspect that’s mostly from chronic dystress. Not periodically eustress. If we have seasons or times of intense work, followed by plenty of leisure, that could be perfectly fine. Or even "should" be perfectly fine, as this is what an intense life is all about: Short moments/periods of intensity, followed by times of intense pleasure which was earned and not granted.
I think there’s an extreme boon that comes from earning periods of semi-retirement. Once you have the opportunity to not work for 3-6 months, you quickly realize it wasn’t necessarily working, you wanted to escape. But rather something about the work you were doing. Maybe the lack of control over your time, or the type of stress you had to deal with, but everyone wants to find some kind of meaningful work; we just don’t often get the opportunity. And if we spend 40 years working on a normal non-seasonal schedule, we never get the opportunity to find that space and reflect on what we’re really missing in our work.
The open questions
So far, the seasonality of my work has been largely coincidental, though I’m sure driven by some deeper psychological current. Could I make it intentional though? Or would it lose its magic?
Could we all identify what parts of our year seem to be very low output, what parts foster reflection, and what parts foster extreme productivity, and design our work around them?
For certain kinds of work, we certainly could, but I recognize that’s limited to a rather narrow scope of people. If it’s an option available to you, though, I think it’s worth trying.
Maybe you designate two to three months of the year for minimal output and maximum recovery. Or try to push hard for four to six weeks at a time, followed by an equal amount of recovery.
A month of 12 hour days followed by a month of 4 hour days feels more sustainable than a lifetime of 8 hour days. But I suppose we’d have to try it to find out.
Either way, I’m going to have to embrace a certain amount of decreased productivity over the next few months. And while that’s scary in one sense, I’m also looking forward to it. And I’ll be curious to see what it leads to in the Spring.
Winter - The reading season
With my reflection in that piece on my past years of work, it's been pretty clear that winter (especially the end of the year) is typically low productivity and leads into a highly productive new year (spring). So I'm trying to intentionally lean into that this year by dubbing winter "reading season" as well as "refine-my-way-of-living season".
I don't have any strict rules for reading seasons, besides, well, reading and producing one life-changing impact for the next year. I haven't read much this year, so it's nice to get back into it.
I'm still working, but only on what I feel like working on. I'm not setting too many deadlines or tasks, just putting time into areas I'm pulled towards. This is, by the way, the advantage of producing early in projects instead of waiting until it is urgent. The results I am producing at the moment with my team of architects at Airbus are way ahead of everybody else, but it will be necessary next year anyways. So, why not be ahead of the curve of work distribution and therefore have less to worry about next year?
Then there's the question of "what to read?" One thing I want to do this season is re-read some of my old favorites. It's always interesting to me how important timing is with books. The right book at the wrong time isn't very useful. Sometimes books that don't speak to you much at one point in your life are much more impactful later. Or books that are really impactful at one point mean less later, or you find different things in them.
So I'm going to try to revisit some of my favorites, especially from the Made You Think days.
I'm also going to try to explore a specific topic area
more, starting with some of the histories of finance and
money. It feels like we're at a really special point in
time with everything going on in crypto, but that doesn't
mean old patterns of history won't repeat. I'm
particularly interested in all the mania around the
dot-com boom of the early 2000s. There are likely some
parallels there.