Embrace Seasonality

Alisa Lin | Clock Time versus Seasonal Time | Other Voices on Seasonality

Photo by Mason Kimbarovsky on Unsplash

We can’t ignore the role that our fluctuating energy plays in our productivity. We mustn’t resist it or shame ourselves for it. Most productivity authors don’t talk about mood, and instead, they imply that implementing their detailed planning and scheduling structures will tame any contrary mood into submission. But I am very skeptical that this works, even if it’s become the common assumption of writers in this genre.

| Alisa Lin, Our Fluctuating Energy

The ebb and flow of mood, energy, and making headway.

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Clock Time versus Seasonal Time

Remember, the Sun and the Moon are out there, and inside us.

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It’s a natural time of year to look back and ahead, make plans, and assess last year’s efforts. I keep a journal, diligently and digitally, so I make it a regular practice at inflection points like the New Year (both solar and lunar) to look back at what I was up to a year ago.

Early last year, Cal Newport, who I respect greatly, wrote an essay for the New York Times entitled To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality. I rediscovered the essay in my journal, and my initial reaction to it. Rereading it this year led me to radically different conclusions than on my first look.

First of all, he doesn’t really dig into burnout: the term appears only once in the piece other than the title. (Perhaps the title was the editor’s, not Newport’s. It should have just been Embrace Seasonality, which I have co-opted.)

What Newport wanted to do was, in fact, make an argument for embracing seasonality in knowledge work, and moving outside clock time, the fast time model of factories, railroads, and markets, into a slower, variable time of seasons, tides, and natural cycles.

I think his argument starts off wrong-footed, and while it seems balanced and logical, and, yes, while he is arguing in favor of greater positive freedom for knowledge workers, he winds up reinforcing the mistakes of industrial thinking to make his point.

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Newton starts by taking the long-view:

For most of human existence, the pace and intensity of productivity varied widely from season to season.

And then, our fall from grace:

It was the Industrial Revolution that ruptured this natural work cycle.