Ep. 08: Cycles of Creation & Rest
We were never meant to be productive 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, 52 weeks a year.
Nothing in nature works like that. Capitalism is an inherently unnatural way to structure a society, and it’s not your fault if the system failed you.
It took me falling unconscious two blocks from my son’s school to realize that keeping things running on all cylinders was not something I could sustain.
In this episode and the next, we’re going to talk about the day-to-day implementation. The planning, writing, recording, posting, and all of the things we’re supposed to do to keep things running.
I swore for the longest time that “operations was my weakness,” but I think what it really was I felt trapped in my business. And it was because, as I planned my quarters, I didn’t realize that not every week or month or quarter itself needed to be packed full of projects.
Reframing Rest as an Essential Part of Creating a Sustainable Business
Breathing room is a necessary part of the process. I took Lindsay Mack’s Heart of Service course, which talks about these cycles and connected it to the Tarot. She refers to Sacred Gestation, Creation, Transition, and Death. I did this back in 2021, so I’m not sure if this is still available, but if I find any resources on this, I’ll link them in the show notes.
You can also think of it like the cycles of the seasons or the moon. However you choose to define it for yourself, there is always a winter, a dark side of the moon, a time for quiet and integration.
Unfortunately, when you’re disabled or chronically ill, your body chooses those cycles FOR us instead of the other way around. I’ll talk about that more in the next episode, but I’ve noticed I get fewer severe flares when I’m building in those rest periods after big pushes.
The final and arguably most integral part of the framework I developed was “Capacity-Building Content Processes.” I knew it was important, but beyond repurposing the lengthy, more meatier content or batching like tasks, I didn’t know how to define this in a way that made my plans doable and not just another way to beat myself up or doubt if I was cut out for this whole entrepreneurship thing.
For the last two years, I’ve let January be a period of integration and processing the previous year instead of jumping into the high-gear planning season. Other ways can be giving yourself a week off a month from client calls, or taking a month off in the summer, like Tracy Stanger. I’ve seen folks using the 13th week of the quarter as their reset week.
Me? I’m going to try to take what I’ve created over the last couple of months and schedule throughout the summer and see if while my kid is out of school, I can stick to 4-hour workdays.
Building in joy and rest is what’s going to keep your work sustainable. And we need you and the work you do.
ACTION STEP
You may not understand your energy patterns yet. We all have dips and times where we’re most creative. The first aspect that I look at both with myself and clients is understanding these energy patterns better.
For a few weeks, track your time by the hour. You can use paper or a digital tool, but paper is what I use to remind me to track all of the small chores and offline tasks that I do, instead of just purely “work” tasks.
Use this as information. I realized through this that it takes me at least an hour to “warm up” and get ready for deeply creative work; I can’t just jump in as some other folks do. Build in buffer or rest time into your routines and use some of the earlier examples as inspiration.
Deciding on Your Own Mix of Structure & Flexibility
I had a post queued up at the beginning of April that went through what I was able to accomplish in quarter one. Despite having the flu and taking January to process 2025 before committing to any plan.
There was no intent to shame, but I also didn’t want to come across as “I’m chronically ill and can do it, why can’t you?”
So I held back.
But the one thing I WILL say is that a major life-changing insight that helped me these last few months is realizing that we all need varying levels of structure and we all need varying levels of flexibility BUILT IN.
Those levels will be different based on your own personal situation, but just “winging it” didn’t work. When capacity did open up for me, I flailed for hours, not knowing what direction to go in, and overthinking hit me HARD.
But it’s deceptively easy to go all in on building a structure that’s more confining than helpful. I used my plans as a way to beat myself up, which just made me lose motivation because if I wasn’t going to follow a plan 100% or only have a good week maybe a third of the time, why did any of it matter?
The true shift out of overwhelm & overthinking was seeing adjusting my plan not as a failure, but a feature. Something inherent to running my business, just as much as making sales or sending emails.
When there are days where everything hurts, and my brain doesn’t want to work, I decide on whether its a work from bed/couch day, if it’s a sleep later day, or if it’s just a minimum “let everyone know I’m alive” day.
When a whole week starts to spin out of control, what’s one action I can take that would make me feel inspired, energized, or accomplished?
Looking at my roadmap or list of projects, which one do I have the energy for?
Do I not have deep work capacity, but maybe I have admin, mindless task capacity? Let me go ahead and organize photos on my phone or in Canva.
What’s a way I can save energy/work for future me?
A weird thing happened as I tempered my expectations: instead of doing less, I did MORE. I’m really not trying to flex, just report this observation. Client projects stayed on track, and big projects I’d been putting off started getting done.
People talk about getting rid of their should to the point it kind of feels cliche, but when I realized: ‘Hey, I can’t sit at my desk today due to pain, but I could still write’ or ‘it’s hard for my brain to boot up immediately after waking up’ I realized that there was usually a SHOULD behind it.
You should be at your desk otherwise, people will think you’re not really working. Or, you should be ready to work directly at 8-8:30 AM. Who decided that? If I’m doing what I need to do, why does it matter?
Freeing myself from the expectation of what a productive week should look like was what actually helped me to see momentum that hasn’t happened in years.
ACTION STEP
Now that you know your own patterns for when you’re creative and able to take action, use this as a guide to plan your week. Not with what you think you should be able to get done, but realistic with the time and energy you have.
This week, something may come up that forces you to adjust; that’s okay. What can you take off your plate? Or what’s the simplest way to do the thing that you can make pretty or optimize later? Or can you adapt your environment to what you need to get the work done?
In the next episode, we’re going to tackle the weeks when even existing feels overwhelming. Planning for your low capacity, or at least giving yourself an out, helps take the pressure off so you can come back to work when you’re ready without overthinking it.
