Living Seasonally

We didn’t invent the idea of structuring life by seasons. But for us, it wasn’t a lifestyle choice—it was survival logic. Our schedules were irregular from the start—nightlife, kitchens, tradeshows, long drives and quick pivots. We tried the other way. We tried nine-to-fives. We intersected with them—some stretches better than others—but they never held. Not sustainably.

The shape of our lives didn’t change because of a sudden flash of insight. Ilinca and I didn’t need a better calendar—we needed a better question. Or at least a clearer picture of what we were aiming for.

At the core, it was simple. We wanted time together. Everything else flowed from that. Then we studied what it took to get there—who had done it, how they’d built it, what scaffolding held it up. Then we worked backwards. Layer by layer, step by step, we reverse-engineered the conditions required to make our life fit our goals instead of cutting our goals to fit our life.

And yeah—sometimes that meant staying in the thick of something that looked aimless or too hard. But it wasn’t. It was just the step we were on. Until suddenly we’d shift again. A new city. A different pattern. A product built or a prototype dead. A book released. A website spun out. A quiet pivot that shocked people who thought they had us figured out.

That cycle repeated enough that we realized: we weren’t failing to “stick to something.” We were moving according to a deeper pattern. One worth naming.

The Prospectus

Each December, and again sometime in February, we do what we call the Prospectus. It’s not a strict ritual, but it’s deliberate. One of us usually lights something. The kid might be half-asleep on someone’s shoulder. There’s often music playing in the other room. We bring out a big calendar and start marking it—not with goals or resolutions, but with realities. Event dates. School closings. Garden season. Launch windows. The dog’s cycle. That one lake trip that resets everything. Product windows. Travel. Everything in one place, layered, so we can start to see what kind of year it wants to be.

We don’t do this in a vacuum. We do it knowing how our lives tend to arc, and what kinds of effort feel possible in which parts of the year. We divide time into 114-day blocks—not quarters, exactly. Just long enough to hold a meaningful shift. Just short enough to notice when we’ve drifted. Each block bends slightly into the next. Each has a feel. A flavor. A drift pattern.

Doing this isn’t a magic fix. It just gives us a shape to work inside. And it keeps our attention on what matters, not what’s merely loud.

Living on Rhythm, Not Repeat

Most productivity systems assume you reset every Monday. But we don’t. We’ve learned that our bodies, our minds, and our work each have their own cycles. Spring comes with too many ideas. The ones worth pursuing usually show themselves in May. Summer scatters us—travel, experiments, chasing a different kind of momentum. Fall sharpens. Winter folds inward. Strategy and recovery happen there. Sometimes grief. Sometimes rebirth.

None of this is aesthetic. It’s operational. We plan rollouts, rest, social obligations, and personal projects around these patterns. It’s not to be romantic. It’s to avoid wasting energy on things we could have timed better if we’d just acknowledged what we already knew: we are not the same people in August that we are in November.

One Step at a Time

We didn’t figure this out all at once. We still haven’t. But each time we do the Prospectus, it gets easier. The first time might take days. But eventually, you’ll start to see it. That certain parts of you—certain roles, certain memories, certain hungers—each hold dates that matter. And if you lay them down carefully, all in one place, the rest of the year starts to take shape around them.

This isn’t about control. It’s about clarity.

We’re not the first people to think this way—Jesse Itzler’s Big Calendar covers similar ground. The difference is: we made ours to hold the shape of a life we were already living.

Days Without Names

We don’t really do weekends. We don’t go to the beach when everyone else is there—not so much because of the people, but because of the time cost of overfull municipal and private spaces. We'd rather feel the wind without shouting over someone’s Bluetooth speaker. We’re the weekday beach walkers. The drizzle beach people. The too-hot or too-cold or too-windy types who show up when the place is empty. Some of our best memories come from those days. They’re never planned in the traditional sense. They just belong to us.

We don’t chase long weekends. We don’t live for Friday. Brunch is great always and admittedly a ritual for us. But the cycle of wound-up weeks and blow-off releases isn’t ours. We got good at it. But it didn’t take us where we were trying to go—with the certainty we want to gamble with.

And it’s not because we think the people caught in it are wrong. But the world’s incentives are loud, and if you don’t interrupt them deliberately, they’ll run your whole life. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s just momentum plus advertising plus fatigue. A recipe that’s hard to escape unless you start noticing where it lives.

Capacity Planning for Real Life

We don’t put everything in one basket. We build in time to switch gears. Some weeks are for public work. Others are internal—writing, parenting, tinkering, letting messes be messes until they turn into something else. There are weeks for family density. Weeks for offloading mental weight. And sometimes, entire seasons where one or both of us is consumed by something that won’t let go until it’s done.

We don’t push through those. We design around them. We park what we can, and when the season changes, we return. We don’t expect all our projects to run year-round. Some hibernate. Some bloom.

One of the things we do in the prospectus is break time up by facet. We’ll go through the whole year just looking at Ilinca’s creative pursuits. Then again, only with family in mind. Then again, for each business or brand. Then again for “small desires”—the things that don’t matter on paper, but that seem to always come back. I’ve wanted to go to the Springville mass plant and garden show for ten years. It’s not important to anyone but me. But it still belongs on the calendar. Because it’s mine. Because we aim to.

Permission Is Too Small a Word

People sometimes say “must be nice,” or “not everyone can do that.” And they’re right. Living like this takes more than permission. It takes skill. Discomfort. Coordination. Luck. Endurance. Being broke and building anyway. Making systems when none are offered. Saying no to things that make sense on paper. Following up when it’s unglamorous. Investing in relationships—or disappearing for years into the rabbit hole of self-construction, cut off from friends and family by time, not distance. Studying how things work. Getting it wrong and doing it again anyway.

It’s not a lifestyle—it’s what Simon Sinek calls an infinite game. Not endless, but larger than any single cycle. And we still drop the ball. A lot.

But we don’t aim for perfection. We aim for rhythm. That’s different.

Crowds aren’t just inconvenient. They change the energy of a place. They shape whether something’s an accessible use of time and energy or not. We watch for those patterns and move around them. Not to control everything, but to make space where connection can actually happen.

Explore the Living Seasonally Companion Guide →

A soft structure to hold a life built on rhythm, not rigidity.