288. Work with Your Season, Not Against It

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Marissa: Would you plant flowers in December? Would you plan a ski trip in June? What if you’re doing something similar right now and it’s quietly undermining everything you’re trying to achieve? When you’re mindful of your season, you get more of the fruit you’re hoping for.

[00:00:22] Welcome to focus on this, the most productive podcast on the internet. I am Marissa Hyatt.

[00:00:28] Joel: And I’m Joel Miller.

[00:00:29] Marissa: And this is where we remind you of something you already know. It’s not about getting more things done, it’s about getting. The right thing is done

[00:00:37] Joel: both at work and in life, and today we’re talking about the season you’re in and how you can respond, but.

[00:00:45] Before we begin, it might actually be worth mentioning the fact that we’ve been gone a little while and the folks might wanna know what has been going on.

[00:00:55] Marissa: Yes. We have been a little bit MIA for about a month and I’ve gotten several questions. We’ve had people reach out in our community about this. The good news is we’re alive and well.

[00:01:06] Well, me mostly you can hear I’m a little bit stuffy still. I got hit with a really bad respiratory virus right into the new year on day one of 2026, which was. Very pleasant. And then that took me out and took our recording out for the last couple of weeks. But Joel, what happened in December?

[00:01:23] Joel: Yeah, December was one of those miraculous and terrible months all at the same time.

[00:01:28] It started off terrible. It ended miraculous. So that’s kind of the trajectory you want to go in, if you’re gonna go through it. Yes. But um, our daughter, Naomi. Was struggling with an adverse reaction to her anti-seizure medicine and we ended up with a hospital stay and several weeks before that of not knowing what was going on.

[00:01:51] It was actually quite frightening, and thankfully once it was properly diagnosed. She got on the right treatment and everything is better. But my goodness, that was, uh, hair raising as they say. It was terrifying.

[00:02:06] Marissa: Yes. And for somebody who doesn’t have hair. The fact that it was still hair raising just shows you what, what a month it was.

[00:02:13] Yeah. That’s the

[00:02:14] Joel: kind of month it was. Yeah.

[00:02:15] Marissa: Yes, it was. It was quite the experience, I think, for all of us and, and pretty frightening, like you said. Uh, but we’re grateful. Luckily, Naomi is doing really well and she’s been treated properly, is on the road to recovery, so we’re grateful for that. Everybody was home for Christmas, but.

[00:02:32] We’re gonna be talking about today. There’s different seasons that we go through in our life, and sometimes they’re long seasons, sometimes they’re short seasons. December was certainly its own season for our family, the Hyatt Miller family. It was a challenging one. And, um, I think that whenever this happens, we have to be realistic and we have to adapt to what’s going on.

[00:02:53] And we tell you guys this all the time, that when this stuff crops up and, and this is really what we’re gonna talk about, how do you handle life and responsibilities and all the things that come with it And, um, we’re keeping it real guys. I. Life happens sometimes. Sometimes you get sick. Sometimes you have a child who ends up in the hospital for an emergency situation that nobody could have planned, that nobody can plan around.

[00:03:16] We were sad to not be with you guys for the month of December and the first couple weeks this month. Uh, but we’re excited to be back. Hopefully we can impart a little bit of wisdom for you no matter what season it is. Hopefully you’re not going through one of those seasons yourself. Hopefully it’s something else.

[00:03:31] I think we have several seasons that we’re gonna talk about today, but hopefully this gives you a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of permission that sometimes it’s okay to let the things go that you love, you’re excited about. Sometimes you need to tend to other things in your life.

[00:03:47] Joel: It’s just like you have to be aware of what’s happening around you and what is it, John Lennon’s line Life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans, right?

[00:03:56] Yeah. I mean, that’s just how it goes. And if. If we don’t acknowledge the season that we’re in and we’re just fighting against it, it doesn’t work out. And we tend to experience vastly inferior results than we would’ve if we just had worked with what we had.

[00:04:12] Marissa: Absolutely. Well, and I think it’s important, you know, we talk about the various seasons in our natural world, right?

[00:04:20] We plant differently in spring, in summer and fall. You know, we can get. Different things at the farmer’s market at different times of year. Like for instance, right now it’s January. You know, I’m not going to the farmer’s market and seeing tomatoes, at least here in Tennessee, although we do get tomatoes far into the season more than other places.

[00:04:40] But the point being is there’s different seasons for different things. Right. We’re not really looking to go swim in the lake this time of year or go take boat out. It’s a little, yeah, unless you’re looking at into polar plunging or cold plunging or something like that. But typically this is not the best season for those types of activities.

[00:04:59] Joel: The idea here is that we get the best return when we align our actions and our seasons, and the truth is, you might not be in the same season as the people around you just because. This is, for instance, the start of the new year does not mean you’re in the exact same place that everyone else is. Even though the media, social media, just the kind of environment tends to communicate that to us, that may not be remotely true for you.

[00:05:24] Marissa: Sometimes this is the season where we feel the most friction because everything culturally is kind of saying, Hey, that’s New Year’s. Let’s do all these New Year’s activities, get into our health and you know, start working out. Eating salads and things that are actually kind of counter to the actual season, the winter season that most of us tend to be in at this time of year.

[00:05:46] So today we’re gonna look at five seasons that you might find yourself in, in any given point in your life, the dangers in that specific season. This is super interesting. And how you can respond effectively no matter what the season is, no matter what life is serving you up. We’ve got some really good stuff today.

[00:06:04] Joel: Well, let’s start talking about the first season, the sewing season. You know, as I said, this is the new year. This is sort of assumes that we’re in the sewing season. This is the season where we are supposed to have margin and energy and bandwidth available. We’re itching to start something new.

[00:06:22] Opportunities are like they’re magnetic. They just attach themselves to us or we feel drawn to them. Mm-hmm. But there’s a danger. There’s a danger here. I wonder if you could unpack that for us.

[00:06:32] Marissa: Yeah, so I think that a lot of us, this time of year, we get so excited. We get so motivated. We’ve got, you know, a lot of you probably joined us at your best year ever live.

[00:06:40] You set your goals, you’re super excited, but the danger. Is that we have this burst of inspiration and we end up starting too many new things.

[00:06:52] Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:52] Marissa: Frankly, I have been preyed to this more times than not, because I get really enthusiastic, really excited, and I just wanna do everything, especially all at the same time, because I’ve got the motivation.

[00:07:04] Right. It’s like knowing that you have an extra a hundred dollars in your bank account to spend. It’s like, cool, I’ve got free money. But then you actually go out and you accidentally spend 200. It’s like, whoops. That thing that I decided to splurge on with my free money ended up costing me more because I wasn’t accounting, um, for all the other things that went in with that.

[00:07:26] Yeah, so a lot is possible, and especially this time of year, we feel that collectively that collective energy of possibility, but it doesn’t mean that everything’s possible at the same time.

[00:07:38] Joel: Yeah, it’s like our ambitions, outstrip our abilities or our capacity, or however you want to think about that. We feel inspired, as you said, and we want to just jump in and embrace everything that we might be able to do and.

[00:07:53] There’s an opportunity cost, just like you know, you mentioned once you spend that a hundred dollars, it can’t be spent on something else. It only goes so far, right? That’s something that we rarely recognize when it comes to our capacity or our abilities, and so that means. That in this season, there’s a particular need for focus.

[00:08:12] If you wanna avoid the danger of starting too many things, you need to focus. That might mean taking that big ambitious list of goals and pairing it down to just one or two that you’re gonna pursue this quarter, maybe three, but really check your ambition. Look at your ambition as it relates to.

[00:08:31] Everything else in your life and then say, what do I really need to do to move the needle in my life as opposed to what are all the great things I could do?

[00:08:40] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:08:40] Joel: Because there’s endless options and yet there’s not endless you. You can’t actually do it all. So what would actually be the most meaningful thing or things few that you could do?

[00:08:51] That’s what we need at this time. Focus.

[00:08:53] Marissa: Yes. And it doesn’t mean that all those other things that you wanna do, you can’t do. You certainly can do those things at some point, but the point is, we don’t wanna do everything simultaneous. And so choosing just one, two, maybe three at most goals to focus on right now.

[00:09:09] It’s probably one of the highest leverage things you can do, because the impact that you can make on those goals when you’re just focused on a couple is so much greater.

[00:09:18] Speaker 2: Yeah. The

[00:09:19] Marissa: clarity that that provides for you in terms of what you’re saying, Joel, of what do you really need to do to move the needle on these things?

[00:09:26] If you have a laser locked focus on just one or two goals, the clarity that you have in terms of how to answer that question of what actually is going to move the needle. Skyrockets compared to if you have 15 things or eight things that you’re trying to work on at any given time. There’s a lot of different options and decision fatigue sets in and all kinds of things.

[00:09:46] So focus is really key here. We just wanna narrow in on just a couple,

[00:09:50] Joel: you know, part of that is. When you spread your effort out across multiple initiatives, you’re gonna see that effort produce less than it would have if you focused it on just a few things. You’ll have better thinking around those things.

[00:10:05] You’ll have better problem solving around those things. You’ll make more progress around those things, and ultimately, what that means is you’ll be happier with the results. What’s. The great trick of this year, the great hoax of this year, is that you can do everything, and then what ends up happening is you end up doing so little and feeling like, well, that that was a bum steer.

[00:10:27] That was wrong. I shouldn’t have even tried. Right? And that’s not true either. So many people give up on New Year’s resolutions, for instance, when they fail them, that they never set them again. That’s the wrong response. The response is just get focused on a couple things

[00:10:41] Marissa: and it takes discipline, it takes a, a certain level of maturity to do this.

[00:10:44] I think this is not something that Joel, you and I, or, or those of us at full focus have come by easily. I think that this has been a hard one lesson for us to learn. Yeah, probably. And it’s a really important one, uh, because. When you do lean into this and you just choose to accept your own limitations, what is possible is actually much greater.

[00:11:05] Like I said, the impact that you can have. Those few goals is far greater than the impact you can have on several. So yeah,

[00:11:13] Speaker 2: that

[00:11:13] Marissa: is our first season, which is your sewing season. So you want to narrow in on your focus so that you’re not starting too many new things. Our second season is a fallow season.

[00:11:24] Now this is a season when a farmer intentionally doesn’t plant in the field, but lets it recover after a harvest and. Similarly, this takes a certain level of maturity, I think, to learn this lesson specifically and, and to see yourself through this because this is where a lot of us actually are this time of year.

[00:11:45] If you’re anything like me and my marketing team, um, or pretty much any professional, frankly, in the world at this point, Q4 is super, super intense, right? This is where we push and we, we have all these end of year goals to hit, and deadlines and all these things are fast approaching. And it’s super intense and we could keep going.

[00:12:07] That could be an option for us, but it may be that we need to intentionally let ourselves rest and recover. Mm-hmm. So that when we come back the next year or the next season, uh, we’re greater and better. So this is really a beautiful season. If you can be intentional with it, you can be very intentional, satisfied, and.

[00:12:28] You may feel really tired at the same time. That’s a normal response to coming off of a, an intense sprint like most of us have in Q4. Winter. We’re in the winter season. This tends to happen this time of year as well, where we feel this need. To rest, to kind of go inward. You know, you think about the bear hibernating in winter.

[00:12:48] Mm-hmm. And this is kind of the opportunity. We’ve, we’ve gone out there, we’ve done the hunting and all the things, and it’s time to come back in and rest. Sometimes that New Year’s energy, that idea of possibility and goals and starting things new. Like I said, can go against our actual biology.

[00:13:05] Joel: This is a great moment to recognize what the season itself is actually telling us.

[00:13:09] You know, there’s less light in the day. It’s colder. It’s much easier to stay indoors, and maybe that’s not always the right answer, but to kind of make your life a little smaller in this season is not necessarily a bad thing. It may be the most appropriate response to what’s the push that we just went through, because the danger of not doing that.

[00:13:29] Ultimately is burnout. If we don’t get the rest that we want and instead, or need, I should say, and instead just plow ahead into Q1 as if it’s the same as Q4, we may end up finding ourselves fried. Yeah. After a seasonal sprint, which makes sense. You know, Q4, as you mentioned, it has all of these particular goals attached to it.

[00:13:50] There’s these ambitions to close the year strong. There’s all of that, but we need recovery time and if we don’t take time for that, it’ll end up coming out of. Yeah. You know, it’s sort of like a credit card that you end up maxing and if you don’t pay it back, you’re gonna be in trouble. And that’s exactly what happens to our energy.

[00:14:08] It’s what happens to our ability to pursue new goals and all of that. We end up pushing through or trying to maintain the same pace and we burn out.

[00:14:16] Marissa: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I use an aura ring. I have one that I wear every day to monitor my sleep and my activity and all kinds of things. And. One of the things that I always find interesting is after a day where I’m really active and I’ve maybe I’ve gone on a long walk or a hike, or I’ve done an intense workout, the next day my readiness score goes down actually.

[00:14:40] Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. And

[00:14:41] Marissa: you would think it would be the opposite. You would think, man, I’ve like done all this great work and you know, I should be, my readiness score should be through the roof and everything. And it actually goes down after a day of intense activity because it’s your body’s signal to say it’s time to rest.

[00:14:56] Right. You know, we pushed and now we rest. We recover. And it’s a little bit counterintuitive for a lot of us. We feel like, man, we should keep going. We should kind of be riding that wave. And the truth is, we’ve got to rest. So this is the important thing here. Uh, if you find yourself in this season a fallow season where you’ve pushed hard, you’ve gone through this sprint, you’re struggling potentially on burnout, it’s time to intentionally rest.

[00:15:21] So, uh, we wanna let the ground, and in this case ourselves rest. So, Joel. I think there’s a really interesting model here for about seven different types of rest. Will you walk us through what those look like?

[00:15:33] Joel: Yeah, so Sandra Dalton Smith has talked about seven different types of rest that we need and can benefit from.

[00:15:44] As you’re listening, see if any of these resonate with the season that you feel like you’re in, the kind of rest that you might need. She talks about physical rest. This would be like passively things like sleeping and napping. Could be active also like yoga or stretching, but things that allow you to physically rest in a way that’s not a, the kind of exertion that is prone to frying our wires, so to speak.

[00:16:10] Yeah. And speaking of frying our wires, mental rest, this is like letting your brain just go into neutral, taking a break. Slowing down. Mindfulness exercises are great here. If you’re the kind of person that devours self-help books, try reading a novel instead, just you wanna like give your brain a chance to catch up to where you’re at.

[00:16:33] Sensory rest, this is like one that I don’t think about personally very often. I actually like a very. Stimulating environment when I need to kind of get going, but to rest our senses, to reduce sensory inputs and avoid overstimulation. I personally am an introvert and so I probably default to this all the time without knowing that I do it and I crank up my sensory environment when I need to get going, but if I am living in that high sensory environment a lot.

[00:17:02] I feel completely outta sorts. I’m like, not myself. One

[00:17:05] Marissa: of the things that you can do with this, it’s kind of controversial, go take a walk without any headphones.

[00:17:13] Joel: What? Can you do that?

[00:17:15] Marissa: Yes. And I think that people in this economy, people don’t realize that. It’s like we, we feel like we’re supposed to be listening to a podcast or we’re supposed to be listening to an audio book or music or something.

[00:17:24] Always having that sensory input. And I love the idea of just allowing your senses to rest, especially auditory, which is one of those that we just constantly have that input. Yeah. And going out in nature and just not having anything except. The natural world. To have that as an input, which is actually calming and restful to your nervous system, can be a really fantastic strategy, especially if you find yourself in a stimulating job or uh, location or something like that.

[00:17:53] Just going outside, being in nature with nothing is pretty powerful.

[00:17:57] Joel: I actually find this very difficult to do.

[00:18:00] Marissa: Yeah, me too.

[00:18:00] Joel: I would almost much rather be maximizing my time by listening to something. Yeah. I recognize the need not to Absolutely.

[00:18:20] The fourth type of rest she talks about is creative rest. This is where you’re reawakening, awe and wonder where you’re going for inspiration, from art, from nature, and so on. This is just about. Finding that thing inside of you that resonates with the outside world in a way that stimulates your creativity, and that is a form of rest.

[00:18:44] Especially when you’re in kind of a work environment that’s very production oriented. To be able to shift out of that mindset into a creative space is incredibly restorative.

[00:18:55] Marissa: And I would say here, for most of us. Who are listening to this podcast and in our community, most of us are not in, I would say the large majority is not in some kind of creative field.

[00:19:06] Most of us are in corporate America or sitting at our laptops most of the day to do our work. And so the more that you can get into kind of the tactical world, whether that’s painting or bread baking or knitting, or getting your hands in the garden or. Going outside, like we talked about and taking a walk in nature or a hike, anything where you’re getting more into the world can really ignite your creativity and allow kind of that other part of your brain that mo, for most of us, isn’t being activated during the workday.

[00:19:42] That can be really restful for our brains.

[00:19:44] Joel: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so Sandra Dalton Smith mentions three more. Emotional rest. This is the time and space to express yourself to being authentic, to being honest, saying no when you need to. Just kind of like carving out a space for yourself and letting the world pass by.

[00:20:03] It turns out that that’s. Incredibly restorative. I like this one. This is probably my favorite. Yeah, that’s a good one. The, I have a t-shirt that picks up on the, um, bartleby, the Scribner story in which, uh, the line just says, I would rather not, you know? Yes. And that’s kind of like if you can walk through life with that, not just on a t-shirt, but actually communicating that to other people in ways that are helpful to you, you’ll get the emotional rest that you need.

[00:20:27] It’s good. And then social rest. This is spending time out of exhausting relationships. You have those friends, you have those relationships that are difficult, that demand a lot of you, and sometimes you just need a break from those situations. Mm-hmm. You need to spend time with supportive people in those cases, unless with the, the demanding people.

[00:20:47] And if you have those types. Like the extreme example are like the emotional vampires that just like suck you dry. This is where it’s time to, you know, go Van Helsing on them and just give yourself a little space. And then finally, spiritual rest. This is about belonging, love, acceptance, purpose. We can find this through prayer and meditation, through community connection, through all sorts of activities.

[00:21:10] All of us are gonna have our particular versions of this, but. We are not just a body, we’re not even just a body and a mind. We have this spiritual dimension of our life. And if we’re not nurturing that with rest, we can find ourselves depleted in ways that, you know, you wake up several months down the road and, and you don’t even know who you are anymore.

[00:21:30] Marissa: Yeah. And I think for a lot of us, we think of rest in one context, you know, which is sleep.

[00:21:37] Speaker 2: And I

[00:21:37] Marissa: think for us, especially those of us who are high achievers who have ambitions and goals, it’s important for us to think of, of rest as multidimensional. It’s not just one note where, you know, we need to make sure that we’re getting adequate sleep, which is.

[00:21:55] Critically important and, and is, is an important factor. But there’s a lot of other types of rest that most of us need. And I think for a lot of us that mental rest is often challenging for us. And so allowing our brains, allowing our bodies, allowing our senses, all of this, to have a level of rest and recovery is so important for helping us sustain that momentum that most of us are trying to create this year.

[00:22:20] Uh, we wanna make sure that we’re sustaining it, not just pushing hard and then burning out. At the end,

[00:22:25] Joel: okay, our fourth season, this is attending season. Tell us more about what we mean when we say tending.

[00:22:34] Marissa: Yeah. Well, this is where we’re overseeing what we’ve already planted. So if you think of this kind of within a gardening or a farming context, this is where we’ve already planted our plants and now we are tending to them.

[00:22:49] We’re weeding, we’re making sure that they have room to breathe and to grow. You know, we’re watering them, we’re we’re nurturing them. We may be fertilizing things. To really get them going. You know, we’re making sure that those pests are staying away or we’re putting boundaries in place to make sure that those things don’t come in to sabotage what we’ve already created.

[00:23:10] So for a lot of this, this is kind of business as usual, so things are typically going well. There’s not really any crisis that’s happening. This is often a nice, pleasant season to go through. It’s just kind of like, okay, this is, this feels doable. It feels manageable, right? But the challenge here is that we can often end up getting into a place of stagnation.

[00:23:34] We’re drifting. This is really the danger with this season. Because we kind of lose sight of why we started in the first place. Right. You know, we haven’t really gotten to the place where what we’ve planted is necessarily producing high yields of things. You know, we’re not necessarily in that season of the harvest, but we’re just kind of going with the motions, and we often can drift off course in this case.

[00:24:01] Joel: This can happen when you have goals that you’ve pursued in the past. Maybe meaningful attainments, a habit that you wanted to install, or just some kind of practice that you wanted to make sure was part of your life, but as the months or even years go on, you recognize it’s not serving you the same way that it used to.

[00:24:19] And if you’re not attentive to that, then you just kind of continue to do it, even though it’s not producing the results that you want,

[00:24:24] Marissa: right? You’re just literally going through the motions and you’re forgetting the why behind what you created, why you started this in the first place. So the kind of solution to this problem of stagnation or drifting is vision.

[00:24:39] So we need to know where we want to go. If we lose sight of where we’re going, then it’s gonna be really difficult for us to sustain this and, and to maintain this, wanting to keep moving forward, right? So we need to know why it matters and what this makes possible. So if you’re in this season of tending.

[00:24:58] You’re feeling like that kind of sense of business as usual, not really having anything set on fire or any crisis or anything like that. It’s really important that you get more connected to the why behind what you’re doing. Yeah.

[00:25:13] Joel: Absolutely. I feel like we might need to adjust our tagline so that we recognize that we are now the most agricultural podcast on the internet.

[00:25:22] Speaker 2: Yes, we are. But

[00:25:23] Joel: pruning is a key season. This is where if we end up without vision, the business as usual gets out of hand and we find that our lives have become overgrown. So a lot of the initiatives of the past, you know, they have their own life, they have their own momentum. We keep them going and. They need to get cut back.

[00:25:42] Our calendar looks crazy. Our task list is outta control. Tending is maintenance, and pruning is the intervention that enables us to kind of get that back into shape in a way that makes sense for our life. Now, Megan, my wife keeps, your sister keeps this garden that obviously needs tending. It also needs active pruning.

[00:26:06] And when that active pruning is not happening, it starts to look like we live in a jungle and that’s got its own benefits, but it’s not actually healthy for the plants and it’s not helpful for the garden overall. Our lives are like that too. We need to cut things back when they get overgrown. And the reason for that is.

[00:26:24] ’cause there’s a danger here too. There’s a danger to every one of these seasons. The danger here is ineffectiveness. We’re just spread too thin to do anything. Well,

[00:26:34] Marissa: yeah, and we know this. If you think about this again, within the gardening context or the farming context, you think of, you know, an apple.

[00:26:43] Farmer, for instance, they have to prune those trees, you know, sometimes hard, you know, they have to prune them back hard. And what happens, the growth that comes out after that pruning season is much stronger, is much healthier.

[00:26:58] Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:58] Marissa: Because they’re forcing growth in specific areas. And so we can think about this with our own context that when we prune, when we cut, which is what we wanna do in this case, we wanna notice what’s working and resource that we wanna put our energy, all the growth, all that.

[00:27:15] Creative energy, that growth energy into what’s actually working and we wanna cut back all this stuff that isn’t working or that’s making us more ineffective or less effective. And so we wanna, you know, think about what can we eliminate. One of my favorite things when we think about all the things that are on our task list, is to ask.

[00:27:35] Sometimes you might have things on there. That you just feel like you’re supposed to keep doing. And one of my favorite questions to ask is, if you stopped doing it, would anyone else notice other than you?

[00:27:48] Joel: Yeah. And even if they would notice, is it worth dealing with what they notice? Yeah. And then just getting done with it.

[00:27:53] Is

[00:27:53] Marissa: it worth it? Right.

[00:27:54] Joel: Yeah.

[00:27:55] Marissa: So there’s often things that we just need to. Eliminate altogether. There’s certain things that we wanna automate and maybe we can utilize AI or other strategies to automate things so that we’re not having to spend our own time and energy on those. And then there’s probably things that are on your plate that you could delegate to another team member.

[00:28:14] Or somebody else to be able to handle, or even within our personal lives, things that are just not the best use of our time and energy that you can delegate out, like grocery shopping. You know, you can delegate that to the person at Whole Foods or um, on Instacart to shop for you so that you’re not spending your time.

[00:28:31] On things that don’t necessarily move the needle. So the goal here is we wanna get things off of our plate as soon as possible. We want to prune and to cut back hard so that that new growth that comes in will be channeled and much stronger and much healthier.

[00:28:48] Joel: I think this is actually a moment where this season, the actual season, the outdoor season, the one in which I walk outside and I wish I had put on on my coat, actually matches.

[00:28:58] What goes on in our life. So the winter is a great time to actually spend some reflective time thinking through how to eliminate, automate, and delegate what’s going on in your life. You have new things you want to do, we have new stuff on the horizon, and we need to make room for it. And so this is a tremendous time to be able to do that.

[00:29:17] Marissa: Our last season that we wanna talk about is arguably the best season. Um, however, I find, frankly in my own life, sometimes this can feel like the most rare season to be in. Mm-hmm.

[00:29:29] Speaker 2: Which

[00:29:29] Marissa: is a harvest season. So this is when you put in extra work and you’ve, you know, really gone above and beyond. You’ve done all the things needed.

[00:29:39] And then you’re at the place where you’re benefiting from everything that you’ve planted. So at Full focus, this often can be kind of this queue for, you know, November, December, January. These are where we feel the most momentum, the most excitement. This is kind of the natural seasonality of our business, that people tend to flock into full focus at this time of year.

[00:30:01] They’ve got big goals for the new year. We may often, you know, during this time, be working longer hours too. This is something where maybe the motivation is high, the momentum is strong, and we need to put in the extra time because we’ve got to reap what we’ve already sowed, right? There’s so much fruit here that we’ve gotta get it.

[00:30:21] So it’s kind of the principle of all hands on deck. But Joel, what’s the danger?

[00:30:27] Joel: Over extension. Uh, I was just gonna comment that my family actually does, on both sides, have a lot of agricultural background. That’s probably true for a lot of people listening. And I remember hearing stories about my cousins in Iowa who basically would get off a school in the fall and then work on the farm all the way until sunset in some cases, and then have to do homework and things like that afterwards.

[00:30:53] This is the time where. Everything depends on making it happen, on gathering the fruit, as you said. And the danger is over extension because there’s sometimes more opportunity there than we can even gather. Right. And when we give ourselves all out. To that gathering process. We run the risk of burning out.

[00:31:16] We run the risk of just being completely overextended. And I think we’ve all been in that season. It’s like it’s going great. Things are amazing, and yet at the same time, at the end of the day, we’re fried. Yep. And that is a season. It doesn’t have to be like that. It won’t be like that, but we need to have in the middle of that season some boundaries.

[00:31:36] So we don’t let that get completely out of control. If you’ve been sort of saying all rest, when you know and there’s like this un mm-hmm answered ellipses at the end of that, you know, that’s like, it’s just gonna drift on forever. No, admit the truth. You’re really not going to, you’re not going to until you choose to, and you have to be honest with yourself to do that.

[00:31:59] The sprint can’t become the new normal. And we talked about this actually in the beginning when we talked about the sewing season and the fallow season. There are times when you need to be, especially the fallow season, you need to let things rest. Right? And if you don’t let things rest, then you’re gonna be overextended and you’re gonna burn out.

[00:32:18] Yep.

[00:32:19] Marissa: I think one of the things too that can be a danger here that a lot of us probably fall prey to is fomo. The fear of missing out, right? It’s kind of like so

[00:32:29] Speaker 2: true.

[00:32:29] Marissa: Everything is happening all at once. You have this collective energy. If you think about a harvest and all the people gathering and everybody in the fields working together.

[00:32:40] You know, bringing all that harvest back, there’s a collective energy. There’s an excitement that’s happening during this time, and even though it may be a lot of work and long hours and all of that, there’s kind of this collective energy that can be really contagious during the season.

[00:32:59] Joel: Intoxicating.

[00:33:00] Marissa: Intoxicating, that’s such a great word for it. And I think that we have to be really self-aware. During this season and to ask ourselves, am I falling into overextension because I’m afraid of missing out? And I think we obviously wanna capitalize on the harvest when it’s there, but we also, like you said, we’ve got to have an end date.

[00:33:19] We have to know. When it’s time to rest and when it’s time to say, okay, we’ve gotten all we needed to out of this harvest, it’s time to now go into a new season. Yeah. So I think the way that we do this is with focus, you know, we tend to come back to focus a lot, but I think that this is really similar to the sewing season, where we’ve gotta narrow that focus the question of what absolutely must get done to reap the benefits.

[00:33:45] And ultimately like what doesn’t, you know, what are, what are the crops that are. The ripest right now, so to speak, that we need to go harvest. How do we take those tomatoes or whatever it is and go can them or preserve them for longer? You know, we want to do that type of activity during this time and remembering we will likely need and not just likely we will need rest after this season.

[00:34:11] So factoring that in is really important. So for a lot of us at full focus, like I said, we’re in this harvest season. It usually goes through the end of January and then it’s going to be time for us to rest. February often is a time where we pull back a little bit, we have a little bit less going on. We can kind of catch our breath and intentionally rest, which is really, really critical.

[00:34:33] Joel: Yeah, absolutely. How do we put this in action? It’s not enough for us to say this listeners are gonna have to do something with this. Yeah. I think that there is a tool that we already have, which is perfectly attuned to this. I wonder if you might unpack that for us.

[00:34:50] Marissa: Yeah. So you guys know this is my favorite tool that we have, which is our weekly preview.

[00:34:55] If you use the full focus planner, you know this process well. Uh, but even if you don’t use the full Focus Planner yet, this is a process that can be really beneficial for helping you in the season that you find yourself in at any given time. So. Before we jump into this, I wanna ask you, those of you who are listening, what season are you in right now?

[00:35:17] You know, we covered five different seasons. We talked about a sowing season. We talked about that fallow season, that season of intentionally pulling back and, and recovering, allowing our ourselves to rest. We talked about attending season, you know, overseeing what we’ve already done. Talked about a pruning season.

[00:35:34] And then lastly, we talked about a harvest season. So which season are you in? And I wanna encourage you when you go through your weekly preview next, so hopefully that will be this coming Friday, maybe you’re doing that today for this coming week, or maybe you do it at the end of the week. You do it on on a Friday, or even on a Sunday for the week ahead.

[00:35:54] Identify the season that you’re in, no matter what season that may be. And then reflect on what it means for you. So based on all that we shared today, you know, the dangers that happen within each of those, those seasons, and then also what the need is. You know, do you need more focus? Do you need to prune?

[00:36:13] You know, do you need to have more rest and factor that in and use that weekly preview as a way to actually make this actionable, put it into action for the next week, whatever that might look like. Whether it’s eliminating things on your plate, factoring in that rest, choosing just one or two things to focus on, go ahead and do that.

[00:36:33] As you go through the weekly preview process,

[00:36:35] Joel: the questions of the weekly preview are naturally given to this, if you remember the dangers that we’ve talked about, because when you look at what’s working, what didn’t and why, if, if those danger points for each of the seasons are popping up as answers for what’s not working.

[00:36:51] It’s a good indication that that’s the season that you’re in.

[00:36:54] Marissa: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Well, highly encourage you guys. Go use your weekly preview. Do that today. If you, you know, hopefully you’re listening to this on Monday when this episode comes out, and if you haven’t done your weekly preview yet, it’s not too late, you can stop what you’re doing.

[00:37:09] Go spend 20, 30 minutes, set a timer for yourself. I find that to be really effective for myself. Or I set a timer so I have limited time to do it. I just get into this, think about your season and go through this process and really pull out what’s most meaningful for you in this season. All right. Joel, what about final thoughts?

[00:37:30] Joel: Well, there’s the saying that goes when you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters. And I mean, those can be big splinters sometimes when that’s happening, when we’re working against our season, we undermine our results and. When we respect the season that we’re in, we get better results.

[00:37:50] We go further. We sometimes go faster. That’s always nice when it happens, but we will end up in difficulty, unnecessary difficulty if we’re pushing against the grain.

[00:38:06] Marissa: Well, thanks for joining us on Focus On This.

[00:38:09] Joel: This is the most productive podcast and apparently the most agricultural podcast on the internet. So please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe at wherever you listen or at focus on this podcast.com,

[00:38:22] Marissa: and we’ll be here next week where we’re gonna talk about your worst productivity habit.

[00:38:28] And spoiler, this isn’t your phone.

[00:38:30] Joel: Until then, stay. Okay. Stay focused.