Work cycles

A big influence on my thinking lately has been Cal Newport and his ideas around deep work and slow productivity. Something that he mentioned on one of his recent podcasts titled Fight Burnout with Work Cycles particularly resonated with me. The main idea is that for humans and the way we evolved, it comes naturally for us to work in cycles. These cycles can come in longer or shorter time frames - so it could be that I work hard for a few hours and then completely unplug later in the day or maybe I have to push hard for a couple of months and then have an extended slow period to recover.

This resonates with me for a couple of reasons, the first being my memories of school and university. The seasonality of school with extended breaks over winter holidays, and then especially over summer, gave a cadence to life where you were pushing hard for a few months but with a reward in the back of your head knowing that you have plenty of time to recharge. Then at some point late in the summer, you would start to get the itch to do a bit more activity and get back to the days where you are pushing hard again. I also remember a feeling where I was leaving university and just saw this endless stretch of time with no break in sight and thinking how truly depressing that was.

But just because we leave the ebb and flow of student life doesn't mean we can't build cycles into our work - and this is one thing that Cal really advocates for. We can build naturally slow periods into our schedules to recover from especially busy times, especially if we create some flexibility in the way that we work.

This reminds me of one of the work experiences I most enjoyed on a day to day basis - working in corporate sales where we would work on big client pitches at a ferverish pace for several weeks before naturally having a wind down period where we would work on some small deals before being assigned to the next big one. Not to say there wasn't stress, as sales targets hung over our heads and created a different, more existential worry that I didn't particularly enjoy about the job, but I remember the slow days where I could take long coffees with my colleagues and we had this sense that we earned it from our hard work the previous weeks.

Now that I have some ability to schedule my own time as a solo business owner, I am going to see how I can incorporate more of this work cycle dynamic.