Work In "Seasons" - Sprint Then Rest

Sprint Then Rest - Work like a Lion.

The concept of working in seasons has become more popular recently, it’s also sometimes referred to as “working like a lion” by many.

The lion metaphor is simply explained as: Relax all day and when opportunity arises or need is created, sprint and exert maximal effort (to catch the prey) and then recharge and relax again.

Similar to a sprinter vs a marathon runner concept.

It’s a decent metaphor but I prefer the seasons one for working or business.

The seasons metaphor for work involves creating specific time periods where you do certain projects, after which you move to another project and so on.

“Projects” can literally be anything from an extremely busy work cycle, to starting up a business, creating a new edge, going travelling for 3 months or just focusing on health.

Specific Seasons For Specific Times

Think of a season is simply a period of time, usually at least a month but can be as high as a year or 2.

This season timeframe doesn’t have to have an end date before starting, the only key is that you know you are in this current season, with its specific dynamics and goals.

For example, if you are an entrepreneur and you see a new opportunity, you may work 12-15 hours a day on this opportunity, but you need to know this is not sustainable long term, nor should it be the goal anyway.

This can be your “grind season” - albeit most people approach this mentality the wrong way as well.

Another example might be the opposite, maybe you got laid off from a job or quit a bad job and want to think about what to do next.

The “Thinking” Season can involve relaxation, unwinding, a lot of unstructured research into what you think you might like to do in the future, or maybe taking other areas more seriously; family, travel, health etc.

The whole idea of splitting your schedule and future into “seasons” is very important for individuals who feel rushed by their own goals and desires.

The reason why this works is it doesn’t have the same time constraints as weeks, months or years.

If you say “I’m in a building season” - that’s very different to saying I’m going to work 12 hours / day until I reach £100k or £100m.

You are more flexible, with both your language, others and yourself.

In a lot of cases you won’t know how long something will take, or when you will feel “better”

The Researching / Thinking Season

Most people don’t work properly.

What I mean by this is they drastically over estimate the amount of effort they think they put into achieving goals.

Effectively working for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, would enable anyone to achieve their goals.

Problem is, most people “work” 8 hours a day, without actually getting any effective output. They are “fake working”. There’s even an entire internet sub-culture about how you can pretend to work during those 9-5 hours….

Craziness.

But effective working comes down to a few things. I call this entire framework unstructured vs structured research.

This is always related back to creating an edge in your life but you can relate it back to any problem solving or creative project, growing any business, improving your role, the process pretty much works for anything. I’m not going to outline it here as it’s already been written about here.

Instead I’m going to talk about part of the unstructured research process which is the “Thinking Time”

Sometimes we’re too busy trying to fix things or put out fires that we don’t stop and re-assess, research and analyse the situation.

AKA.

Stop and Think.

Every culture or society has an idea around this concept of slowing down to make a decision.

Even in thinking fast and slow, the pivotal, albeit a bit ironically slow read book, the main concept was about 2 systems; system 1 and 2.

Very concisely put: System 1 - quick, instant, gut decisions. System 2 - slow, methodical analytical ones.

Yet we very rarely do this on a higher level view.

If you stopped once a month, or even once a quarter and just asked yourself;

What’s the one thing I could do/add/remove/change about my life that would make it substantially better in 3 months?

You’d likely start doing it…

At least till things got tough again and we forgot or slacked (because we’re human).

But that’s why you do this task monthly or quarterly.

For me, I didn’t do this early enough into business journey and ended up forcing the growth of a company that I didn’t want to grow.

Forcing success because I was following goals but not realising there were other roads to achieve them.

I think everyone falls prey to this though.

Another personal example is trying to “get even” instead of simply looking what was working and following that better path.

This is related to a few mistakes I made through 2021 primarily.

Long story short.

Whilst betting sports I had a very bad run in 2021 or early 2022, I tend to try block out the memory.

The issue was I was trying to win at all of them, so creating models for tennis, cricket, basketball, hockey etc.

Issue was, I wasn’t good enough yet.

So instead of just winning a bit, losing a bit in others. I decided to try to win at all, and ended up losing way more money than needed to be, but it’s worse.

During this downtrend (primarily tennis), there was a massive sign pointing towards how good another sport was, something that was generating great profits, but because the overall trend was down, all the effort went into chasing tennis, solving this, over-fitting the model and losing more (and higher amounts).

Whereas if I would have taken a few steps back.

And just noticed that; “Tennis does suck, lets leave that as sunk cost now, use very small unit sizes and simply try to re-build from the ground up.”

I would have also noticed “We’re actually making 10% per bet on the NHL, and this is actually a bigger market, yet we’re betting less… Let’s ramp this up and track”

So what ended up being a very negative period, should have resulted in a good profit and growth of a sport.

But instead, you get in your own head, you think I need to solve this problem, and earn through this one avenue….

Whereas in reality if you invested that time and energy into something slightly different, the returns would be far greater.

The same applies to business.

If you have a business that makes some money but takes so much time, effort and mental energy to keep/grow….But you also have a side hustle that seems to be working but you only put in 10 hours a week…

It might be time to try putting a season into that side hustle and see how that goes.

Seasons also can be related to everything, not just work.

Seasons Are Not Just Work / Business Related

The seasons approach can be used for pretty much anything.

Relationships, travel, new habits, learnings new skills, thinking time, anything.

But you do need to structure the approach correctly, otherwise they can get a bit counter intuitive when taken to extremes.

For example, the concept of “sprint then rest” doesn’t really work in exercise.

If you haven’t even seen a gym in a decade and you decide your season is going to be a all-in on health and fitness one, and you try to lift weights, do HITT training and train 3 times a day.

Obviously, you will f*ck yourself up.

Instead, when it comes to training, it’s the gradual approach, add volume, add weight, progressive overload etc.

But that can be built into a season, just build the structure properly.

For example, I might have a 6 month season where I focus on specific body parts or lifts. Others might be to try more sports or explosive activities.

The season just needs to be specific to your goals for that period.

It should also be painfully obvious based on your priorities.

If you are going through a health and fitness season (which remember can be parallel to other seasons in work, relationships etc) then you might find that you don’t drink for 3 months, or don’t eat dessert.

If you are going through a “increase community” season, then staying out later and going out for drinks will definitely make that easier.

So it all comes down to the goals and the specific season.

But the sprint-rest idea does work for business or work.

The reason is opportunities don’t last forever, and nor does internal (or external for that matter) motivation.

Instead, put your seasons through the edge mentality framework.

Work to build edges, build systems.

These will be extremely difficult to build and find, but if done properly they enable the “off-season” or season for peace and growth in other areas.

Tim Ferriss calls these “Mini retirements”.

These also need to be active though, learn something new, build something else, travel for a month.

The key also lies in something called Active Patience.

Active patience is something I’ll be doing a whole post on soon, but the short version is; when you have built a specific edge/system that you know will benefit you, but there’s a lag-time associated, and you know the best approach is to simply be patient…. What do you do?

You cannot just “wait”.

Especially if you have that “business owner mentality” of “I can work whenever I want” and what ends up happening?

You work all the time.

Instead you have to have active patience.

This is where the mini-retirements, or the changing seasons come in. It’s why the season metaphor works so well.

Utilise active patience.

Work / play on something else in a season whilst you wait for this other one.

Doing nothing or pretending to wait is not the answer.

Simply do things at their best times.

Cheers.

Thomas.