Everyone is locking in for the rest of the year. Here’s what I’m doing instead

The anti-hustle approach and why autumn isn’t the time to pile more onto your plate

There’s a particular kind of pressure that seems to arrive with September.

The summer begins to fade, the mornings feel a little darker, the evenings draw in, and suddenly the conversation everywhere seems to turn towards the final quarter of the year, with people talking about Q4, locking in, finishing the year strong, setting new goals, increasing their productivity and trying to squeeze every last bit of achievement out of the final few months before the calendar resets.

It’s as though September arrives carrying an invisible instruction that says you’d better get serious now. But what if we stopped looking at this part of the year through the lens of productivity and started looking at it through the lens of the season we are actually living in?

Autumn, in the natural world around us, is not a season of endless expansion and outward growth, it’s a season of refinement, recalibration, completion, balance and release. The trees are beginning to let go of what they no longer need, plants are drawing their energy back towards their roots, animals are preparing for the colder months ahead and the landscape itself is gradually shifting from the abundance and outward expression of summer towards something quieter and more inward.

These changes are relevant for us too.

Rather than asking what else can I achieve before the end of the year?, autumn gives us an opportunity to ask a very different question: What actually deserves to come with me into the next season?

You don’t have to finish the year by doing more

I think we have become so accustomed to measuring a successful year by how much we managed to accomplish that we rarely stop to consider whether the way we are pursuing those things is actually supporting the life we want to live. There is always another goal to set, another project to begin, another habit to establish, another area of our lives that apparently needs optimising. And if we haven’t quite achieved everything we hoped to by September, the answer seems to be to work harder.

But I don’t want to spend the final months of the year piling more goals onto a year that is already full, I don’t want to spend October, November and December frantically trying to prove that I have been productive enough, successful enough or disciplined enough. I’ve tried that and I KNOW it doesn’t serve me or my energy to focus my time and energy this way right now.

Instead I want to finish the year feeling well.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have things I want to accomplish, or that I am abandoning my ambitions, but rather that I am recognising that different points in the year call for different kinds of energy.

When we plan cyclically, we stop expecting ourselves to operate at exactly the same pace throughout all twelve months: There are times for expansion and action, times for experimentation and growth, and there are also times for refinement, reflection, completion and letting go. Autumn is one of those times.

So instead of finishing strong, or going in ‘hard’ and hustling my way to the end of the year, here’s what I’ll be focusing on instead. If you feel called to finish your year more slowly and intentionally, these are places you can focus on too:

Start by looking at what is already on your plate

For me, this means that the first step of autumn planning isn’t creating a new list of goals, tt’s looking at the list I already have.

At the beginning of the year, we often make plans from the perspective of one particular version of ourselves, with a particular set of circumstances, desires, priorities and expectations. Nine months later, we are not necessarily the same person; Life has happened. Circumstances have changed. We have learned things. Some of the things we thought we wanted may no longer feel important, while other things may have become much more meaningful than we could have anticipated in January — And yet we often continue carrying those original goals simply because we wrote them down at the beginning of the year.

Autumn gives us permission to reassess.

I want to look at every project, goal, commitment and idea that is currently taking up space in my life and ask whether it still feels relevant.

Is this something I genuinely want? Is it still moving me towards the life I am creating?

Does it feel energising, meaningful or necessary? Or has it become something I am carrying simply because I once decided I should?

There is a huge amount of freedom in realising that you are allowed to change your mind. Some things can be completed, some can be simplified, some can be postponed and some can simply be released.

Not everything needs to make it into the next season with you.

Refining rather than constantly building

Autumn is a beautiful time to turn our attention towards the things that already exist and make them work better.

In business, this is often the less glamorous work that happens behind the scenes — It might be refining your content systems, reviewing your marketing, tidying up your finances, improving your processes, creating automations or finally dealing with the little things that have been sitting on your to-do list for months.

These aren’t necessarily the projects that create the biggest visible transformation, but they can make an enormous difference to how supported we feel by the structures we have created. I’m doing this in my own business this autumn, particularly around refining my content practices and routines, looking more closely at my marketing strategy and automations, and becoming braver about talking about the offers I have created.

The same principle applies outside of work.

Perhaps your autumn refinement is looking at your routines, your home, your finances, your health, your relationships or the way you are spending your time. It isn’t about completely reinventing your life, just noticing what is no longer working particularly well and making thoughtful adjustments.

Sometimes creating more ease doesn’t require a dramatic life overhaul. Sometimes it simply requires us to stop making things harder than they need to be.

Review the year before you rush into the next one

One of the most valuable things we can do as the year begins to draw towards a close is actually look backwards.

Not in a way that turns the year into a report card, where we decide whether we were successful or unsuccessful based on how many boxes we managed to tick, but with genuine curiosity about what the year has shown us.

What worked? What didn’t?

What surprised you? Where did you grow?

Where did you struggle? What gave you energy?

What consistently drained you? Which goals still matter?

Which ones no longer do?

What did you learn about the way you work, rest, create, relate and live?

And perhaps one of the most useful questions of all: How did this year actually feel?

Because sometimes the external picture can look perfectly successful while the internal experience tells us something completely different. A year can contain achievements and milestones and still leave us knowing that something needs to change.

Reviewing the year allows us to gather that information before immediately launching ourselves into another twelve months of goals. Instead of asking only what do I want to achieve next year?, we can ask what have I learned about the kind of life I actually want to be living?

That creates a very different starting point.

Finish what needs finishing

There is also a place for action in autumn.

Cyclical living isn’t about using the seasons as an excuse to avoid doing things that matter to us, and it certainly isn’t about believing we should stop working the moment the leaves begin to fall. There are still projects that need completing.

For me, this autumn includes making sure the 2027 Aligned Planner moves through the printing process as planned, preparing for the autumn launch of the Inner Circle and finishing the final project for Your Year of Becoming. The difference is that I am approaching these things with a sense of completion rather than constant expansion.

The intention is to reach winter having brought the important projects to a natural stopping point, rather than carrying a long list of unfinished beginnings into the darkest part of the year. There is something deeply satisfying about allowing a season of building to actually end.

Because completion creates space. And space is something we rarely give ourselves enough of.

Make room for the parts of life that aren’t productive

Perhaps the most important part of my autumn plan has nothing to do with work at all.

As the energy of the year begins to contract, I want to make more room for the things that may have been pushed towards the edges of my life during the brighter, busier months.

Creativity. Hobbies. Reading.

My own interests.

Time simply spent being present in my life.

There is a tendency within productivity culture to treat these things as rewards, something we can have once the important work is finished. But there will always be important work, there will always be another email, another project, another goal, another thing that could be improved.

If we keep waiting until everything is done before allowing ourselves to enjoy our lives, we can spend an extraordinary amount of time waiting. Joy, creativity and presence shouldn’t be the cost of achieving our goals.

They are part of the life those goals are supposed to help us create.

And so this autumn, I want to deliberately create more space for creativity and inspiration, because I know that what nourishes me now will become part of what carries me into the year ahead.

Decide how you want this season to feel

There is another layer to my autumn planning this year too, because I am moving into a new chapter of my life and finding myself thinking more deeply about who I am becoming.

I want this season to feel like a clean slate in some ways. A chance to rediscover my style, reconnect with what makes me feel like myself, explore what interests me now and become more confident in this particular era of my life. And that has reminded me that planning isn’t only about deciding what we want to do.

It is also about deciding how we want to feel.

What do I want these final months of the year to feel like? What would make me feel proud of the way I moved through them?

What would leave me feeling nourished rather than depleted?

What do I want to have more space for? What do I want less of?

These questions can be just as useful as a traditional list of goals, and when finishing the year well isn’t about how much we manage to squeeze into it, but about how intentionally we choose to move through what is already here these questions play an important role in how you will remeber these last months and how you will feel at the close of th year.

A different way to finish the year

So while everyone else might be talking about finishing the year strong, I am interested in something slightly different.

I want to finish the year with clarity, with projects completed rather than endlessly started, with fewer things on my plate. I want to have finished this year with the foundations in place for what comes next, with a better understanding of what this year has taught me. As well as space for creativity, rest and the parts of life that make me feel like myself.

And, most importantly, with enough energy left to actually enjoy the life I have been working so hard to create.

This is one of the biggest differences between traditional goal-setting and a cyclical approach to planning. Rather than expecting ourselves to operate at the same pace all year round, we can begin to notice the changing energy around us and allow our own priorities to shift with it.

Spring can invite expansion. Summer can bring expression and action. Autumn can ask us to refine, complete and release. Winter can give us the space to rest, reflect and dream again.

None of these seasons is more productive than another. They are simply different.

And when we stop fighting those differences, planning becomes less about forcing ourselves to do more and more about creating a way of living that supports our energy, our health, our nervous system and the life we actually want to experience. The goal isn’t to finish the year with the longest list of achievements. It’s to arrive at winter feeling that you have lived the year rather than simply worked your way through it.

That is what it really means to finish well.

Want to plan your life this way?

If you’re ready to move away from the traditional cycle of set goals → push harder → burn out → start again and learn how to plan your life, work and goals in a way that works with the changing seasons, your energy and your capacity, the Seasonal Soul Inner Circle is designed to help you do exactly that.

Inside the Inner Circle, we work with the rhythms of the seasons, moon and astrology alongside practical planning, reflection and nervous-system-aware approaches to help you create a life that feels intentional without requiring you to constantly push yourself harder.

Because your plans should support the life you’re creating, rather than becoming another thing that takes you away from it.

JOIN THE INNER CIRCLE >>