050 • Splitting life into seasons allows for greater depth + progress

It’s university exam season. One of the most intense, high-stakes times of the year in the university calendar.

Even though I should be revising, I’ve got a lesson to dish out to you concerning this time of year. Also, I don’t want to break my newsletter streak (which has just hit 50 issues - thank you all so much).

I want to talk about how having ‘seasons’ in your life is more effective than trying to juggle all of your life projects at once.

When I describe myself online, I often say I’m ‘juggling’ building a business, writing online and studying. However, this is not strictly true.

At any one time, I’m focusing on just one of these categories, putting the others to the side to improve my focus.

So for example, right now the thing I’m focusing on is university and study. I’ve submitted end-of-semester coursework and am working towards preparing for exams that are starting in a couple of weeks.

And although I want to continue to push the business and my other endeavours at the same time, I know that this is going to have a downscaled return on investment because of how important this period is in determining my university grade.

So I set everything that’s not studying aside. It’s ‘exam season’ now, so ‘exam season’ is something that I try and embody in life and in work.

And then when the exams are done I’m going to have a ‘travelling season’ - again less business, a lot more discovery, gaining experience and sharing new lessons.

Then I’ll come back in July and probably enter business mode again, once I stop moving from place to place and find some peace.

This way, my life actually moves forward in all areas faster than if I try and juggle them all at once.

I can go deeper into each task because I’m switching between different contexts (business, university, travel, training, etc.) a lot less. And that conserves energy, meaning an increase in energy to spend on working, meaning an increase in meaningful output.

Within this idea, I believe it’s important to learn to be okay moving at different speeds. You’re doing different things in different seasons of life anyway, so they’re not comparable.

Perhaps one season your tangible output is a lot less, but this is only so you can carry out the equally important task of integrating emotions and updating belief systems you might have made changes to in a previous season of huge tangible growth.

So that’s the long story of why you might not hear from me much until the end of the month. I’m going to keep doing this newsletter (the highest priority facet to my ‘writing’ life context), but not much else.

As I mentioned above, I’m travelling after this exam season too, which might mean fewer longer-form pieces from me.

So if you want to stay up to date and you only read on the website, Medium or this newsletter, you might want to follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more on-the-ground updates from what I’m doing in the present moment.

I’ll see you next week!

-- Theo

P.S. I know I only mentioned it in passing in the issue above, but I am very proud of reaching fifty issues. Thank you all very much - hang around if you want to keep receiving insights from me!

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What I've listened to this week...​

764 - Cal Newport - The Delicate Art of Mastering Work-Life Balance - An episode all about slow productivity, an idea which inspired many of the ideas I had about seasons and working at different paces with different outputs.