Work with Your Season, Not Against It
Focus on This
Michael Hyatt
4.5 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Would you plant flowers in December—or plan a ski trip in June? Probably not. But many of us do the equivalent with our goals: we try to force outcomes that don’t match our actual capacity, energy, or reality. In this episode, Marissa and Joel walk through five “seasons” you may find yourself in—sowing, fallow, tending, pruning, and harvest—plus the hidden danger in each one and the most effective response. You’ll also learn seven distinct kinds of rest and how to use the Weekly Preview to identify your season and take the right next step.
Key Takeaways
- The Year is Full of Seasons. There’s a natural ebb and flow to life, not just nature. Acting like it’s spring when you’re actually in winter won’t help you. Name the season you’re in and orient around what’s true right now, not what the New Year says.
- Sowing Season: Choose Focus Over Frenzy. When you’re ready to start new opportunities, the danger is starting too many things while motivation is high. The fix: pick one or two goals that actually move the needle and let the rest wait.
- Fallow Season: Rest on Purpose. After a sprint (or a crisis), your system needs recovery. Choose the kind of rest you actually need—physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social, or spiritual.
- Tending Season: Reconnect to Vision. Don’t let “business as usual” make you forget why you started. Keep your why in view so you don’t drift off course.
- Pruning Season: Prevent Ineffectiveness. Just like plants, we become less fruitful when we’re trying to do too much at once. Pruning helps you create margin and center your energy where it can have the greatest effect.
- Harvest Season: Choose Boundaries (Fight FOMO). Momentum is great—overextension isn’t. Decide what must happen now, what can wait, and when the sprint ends.
- Align Your Plans and Your Season. During your Weekly Preview, name your season, watch for its danger signs, and plan your week accordingly. Work with the grain, and you’ll get fewer splinters.
Watch on YouTube at: Â https://youtu.be/QpzDeHQIjmw
This episode was produced by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Would you plant flowers in December? Would you plan a ski trip in June? What if you're doing |
| 0:06.5 | something similar right now and it's quietly undermining everything you're trying to achieve? |
| 0:11.8 | When you're mindful of your season, you get more of the fruit you're hoping for. |
| 0:26.6 | Welcome to focus on This, the most productive podcast on the internet. I'm Marissa Hyatt. |
| 0:27.6 | And I'm Joel Miller. |
| 0:28.6 | And this is where we remind you of something you already know. |
| 0:32.6 | It's not about getting more things done. |
| 0:34.6 | It's about getting the right things done. Both at work and in life. And today we're talking about the season you're in and how you can respond. |
| 0:44.3 | But before we begin, it might actually be worth mentioning the fact that we've been gone a little while |
| 0:51.3 | and the folks might want to know what has been going on. |
| 0:55.1 | Yes, we have been a little bit MIA for about a month. |
| 0:58.7 | And I've gotten several questions. |
| 1:01.3 | We've had people reach out in our community about this. |
| 1:04.3 | The good news is we're alive and well. |
| 1:06.0 | Well, me mostly, you can hear I'm a little bit stuffy still. |
| 1:08.7 | I got hit with a really bad respiratory virus right into |
| 1:12.6 | the new year on day one of 2026, which was very pleasant. And then that took me out and took our |
| 1:19.1 | recording out for the last couple of weeks. But Joel, what happened in December? Yeah, December was |
| 1:24.6 | one of those miraculous and terrible months all at the same time. It started |
| 1:28.3 | off terrible. It ended miraculous. So that's kind of the trajectory you want to go in if you're |
| 1:32.5 | going to go through it. But our daughter, Naomi, was struggling with an adverse reaction to her |
| 1:41.4 | anti-seizure medicine. And we ended up with a hospital stay and several weeks |
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