Somewhere between my quarterly dashboard and my Oura app, there’s a version of my business that actually makes sense.
You see, last week I was looking at both in my annual planning spreadsheet: tidy launch plans marching across Q1–Q4 in one section, and a few columns over, weekly cycle phases aligned to remind me of symptoms and "please don’t book anything big here" weeks.
On paper (or in a browser tab technically), the plan looks gorgeous. Clean arcs. Color-coding. Predictable growth. Each idea and launch slotted neatly into their little calendar boxes.
And then I went to my tried and true friend, patterns over time.
Zooming out on what the last few years have actually looked like…
Which has decidedly not been a straight line.
It was more like a tide chart:
February–March: a burst of creative energy where I want to build everything.
July–August: ideas everywhere, long stretches of focused work that feel weirdly easy but hard to publish.
October–November: another peak where I tend to say yes to big projects.
Mid-November through New Year’s: a hard boundary where my body and my relationships both require a different pace.
I care about the data. I track metrics. I look at numbers every week.
I've learned the realities of running a business over the last 15 years.
But I also track my menstrual cycle, my energy, my health, my caregiving load, and the seasons where my brain feels like it’s made of cotton candy instead of steel.
Because, those things are real.
They impact my capacity just as much as any launch plan.
Don’t get me wrong… from a business and operations perspective, I get the need for quarters, targets, and slightly boring spreadsheets.
I like being able to see trends over time. I want to know if something I'm trying is working. I want my future self to have real information, not just vibes.
But many of us were trained to treat the calendar as the only truth: if the spreadsheet says Q1 is a growth quarter, then your job is to show up with growth-quarter energy, no matter what.
Same output, every week, forever.
That story might work for machines.
But it doesn’t work for nervous systems, bodies, or creative work.
Your body doesn’t necessarily run on fiscal years.
Your ideas don’t reliably arrive because it is the third week of the quarter and your content calendar says it’s time.
Your capacity doesn’t care that your industry peers “always” launch in January.
A note: There is a big difference between being a solopreneur and running a team. I stand by everything in today’s newsletter being applicable to both, but the challenges present themselves differently.
When you have a team, you have more hands and more help to even out the load in busy seasons. But you also have different business models and stressors that make those busy seasons feel (or actually be) more frequent.
When you’re a solopreneur, you are a lot more reliant on your individual capacity. But you also have more control over what happens when, as long as you are meeting your needs.
Both need to be different approaches, which is why I build and write from the place of adaptable, forever frameworks instead of one-size-fits-all systems. Because your unique needs deserve to be the center of the way you spend your days—personally and professionally.
I'll use the launch I'm currently working on as an example:
👉 Last year it got put on the calendar for January.
🙈 Which my body immediately laughed at as I got into the weeds of creation.
👉 Then I aimed for mid-February.
🙊 Which life laughed at as I got into the weeds of launch prep.
👉 Now it's an April launch, with a March 4 waitlist that feels far more realistic for my health, my capacity, the project, and the rest of my life.
None of that means I’m flaky or unserious about this work.
Hell, this launch, specifically, feels like the biggest and most serious thing I've ever done.
What it does mean is that launches and “busy seasons” are always going to exist—whether that’s a course, book, or product launch, a vacation where you want to squeeze in every museum, or a holiday stretch when everyone you love seems to need you at the same time.
And at the end of the day, what I care about isn't creating a perfectly frictionless life where everything lines up with my energy 100% of the time.
No, what I care about is:
Knowing my likely high-capacity seasons so I can batch and build ahead.
Protecting the parts of the year when I know my body and my relationships need more from me.
Leaving room for the plot twists—the flare-ups, the joy, the emergencies, the creativity, the grief—without pretending they’ll never come.
I’m not advocating for perfect alignment.
I’m advocating for awareness and intentionality, so you’re not consistently writing checks your body can’t afford to cash.
If you zoom out on your last six months (or six years), your rhythm might look like:
A couple of months where you are on: building, launching, creating, saying yes to opportunities that finally landed.
A month where you consolidate, fulfill, or simply stare at the wall while your brain quietly reorganizes itself.
A stretch where your health, caregiving, or mental load spikes and you have to redistribute energy whether or not your content plan approves.
A season where your creative well goes quiet, not because you failed, but because the soil is resting.
You might notice menstrual cycles.
You might notice seasonal shifts.
You might notice school calendars, caregiving rhythms, travel, or the way grief shows up in your body.
None of that makes you less committed, less professional, or less worthy of the work, rest, or purpose you care about.
It just means your timeline doesn’t match the blueprints you were handed that say calendars live on a pedestal.
And that’s not a character flaw. It’s a data point.
Try This
Map Your Macro Patterns
If it feels supportive, treat this week as a tiny data-gathering experiment (not a self-improvement project and definitely not a quest to design the “perfect” year.)
Grab your calendar view of roughly the last six months (digital or on paper). Then grab a copy of the below template to pair with this exercise:
In the template you'll find 4 main sections:
Calendar: This shows you the monthly calendar detail with weeks as rows, as well as marking quarters.
Menstrual Phase: If applicable, you can enter the cycle phase per week for added pattern review.
Weekly Commitments: You'll find 5 columns in this section by default: Work, Solo, Family, Friends, Partner. This allows you to note the energy needed for that week across the various main areas of life as you review. Feel free to edit these columns (remove, add, or rename) as appropriate to suit your unique needs.
Month Notes: This space is for noting monthly themes, energy needs/capacity, as well as the patterns you notice as you review.
Mark how you felt each week/month. Whether that was (1) high capacity: creative, resourced, able to execute, or (2) low capacity: foggy, depleted, or like you were forcing it just to keep up. These are just some ideas to get you started.
The Month Notes area is great to jot down anything that was happening around those periods. Do they line up with seasons, business cycles, launches, travel, caretaking, grief?
Lastly, review for patterns. You can sleep on it, or you can do the review right after. Either way, the goal is to notice what patterns emerge. Not the pattern you wish you had, and not the one a book told you to have—the one that actually shows up when you look at your life.
The point isn’t to come away with a color-coded masterpiece.
The point is to be transparent with yourself about the rhythm you already live inside, so future plans have a chance of fitting you.
From there, you can experiment with small adjustments:
Shifting the way you approach launches, if you notice your “busy season” always lands in a low-capacity month.
Building in intentional consolidation time after a sprint, instead of assuming you can go straight into the next thing.
Treating quiet seasons as part of the plan instead of evidence you messed up.
The calendar on your wall (or in your project management tool) is just one kind of information.
It is allowed to be edited.
Your rhythm—the way your energy, health, and creativity actually move through a year—is another kind of information.
And it’s allowed to matter just as much.
You are allowed to build a business, a creative practice, and a life that takes both your calendar and your energy seriously, instead of sacrificing your body on the altar of someone else’s Q1.
Currently Obsessed
To Air Fry or Not to Air Fry. Last summer I finally got an air fryer as part of our never ending “cook good food without turning the house into a sauna” adventures (because this old farm house doesn’t do so well in the warm or cold months.) Here’s one way my neurodivergence really comes out, I spent 8 months telling myself I needed to try making salmon fillets in the air fryer but my silly goose of a brain always made it a giant thing to tackle. Well this week, I finally did it, and hot tip: if you cook salmon with the skin on, flip your fillet so the skin side is up for the last 3-4 minutes for the most perfect crisp to pair with the juiciest salmon in ages (in just 12 minutes). Enjoy!
Cozy Coloring. I’ve picked cozy coloring up again because one of the communities I participate in has a weekly coloring style challenge where we all work on the same page at the same time around a specific effect or coloring style (two-tone, fireworks, etc.). If you too moved on from it, here’s your reminder how much fun it is to get back into.
The only meditation that’s ever worked for me. I don’t know if it’s the neurospicy brain or what but I’ve always been “terrible” at meditation or being still… or generally just feeling comfortable being in my body fully. That was until I started learning shibari from Julieta and practicing self-tying that I realized what that could finally feel like. I now easily spend 45 minutes to an hour in one place deeply connected to my breath, body, and brain. I hadn’t realized how big an impact that practice had on me until I struggled to pick it up again after moving last summer. As I’ve gotten back into the groove this year, it’s been a good reminder that finding the way that works for you instead of trying to do it the way you “should” will change your life. (Surprise, I know! lol This is why I say I do this work alongside you all because I continue to need it just as much as anyone.)
P.S.
If you want the "how" behind these ideas—implementation, client examples, aligned invitations—I write The Bridge on Tuesdays. Join the list here.
