Rationale
About a year and a half ago, I started off the Season of Rhythm. At that point, it was early 2024 and a few things had thrown me for a loop:
- I (finally!) finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Utah after far too long. It was hardly a photo finish — I had already been working full-time in the software industry for ~two years to pay for what was, effectively, a bunch of unrelated gen-ed credit I’d put off
- I had switched jobs, going from a hybrid role to a fully remote one, which threw off a lot of the cadence that “go to office, work, come home” gave me.
At that point in time, things were pretty rough — off the top of my head, there were a handful of periods I can remember not leaving the house for a couple weeks at a time, save for occasional grocery runs. I can appreciate, given hindsight, how much I rely on being able to talk to people daily to mull over ideas (or just bullshit around for a morning). Not having any regular cadence absolutely annihilated me, both personally and professionally.
The goal was clear: build up habits, over time, that would stick for the long run. What that’d entail, exactly, can be seen in the kickoff for Season of Rhythm:
- Getting better about scheduling regular reasons to get out of the house
- Lower variance in daily habits — the primary culprit being sleep
- Lower variance in daily workload
Finding Third Places
I was lucky enough to be in a position to hit the ground running.
The first step was finding more reasons to get out of the house. Thankfully, this started around New Year’s 2024, so a general commercial atmosphere of “Hey — make big changes!” worked in my favor (although I personally despise resolutions). The solution, for awhile, was a subscription to a coworking space.
That was a huge boon — while it stayed cheap. For almost the entirety of 2024 into 2025, I was able to pay a fair amount for general access to a place around a ~10-minute drive from my home. 10 minutes isn’t much, but that drive was enough to be a solid boundary between work and the rest of my life. Even if work bled into the evenings (and it often did), there was something definitive about being able to sign out, close the laptop, and drive home.
As a vote of confidence riddled in coincidence, I knew I’d made the right call when it turned out that the team at my previous job also bought passes for general access to that coworking space. That team was easily the best part of my last position, so being able to continue co-working with them — albeit at different companies — served as a nice transitional period.
After the first year, though, the cost became a hard stopper on that habit. I really did enjoy it, and if I would’ve kept it up at the promotional first-year price. A hike of $300/mo can really make you rethink any habit, no matter how nice. I’ve since transitioned to coffee shops, trying to balance politely taking up as little space as I can, as infrequently as I can — the coffee shop scene from Fleabag haunts my midwestern soul whenever I feel I’ve overstayed my welcome at any given joint. It’s still enough, though, to give my brain a good kick into “you’re at work now” mode, for a lower locked-in investment. I’m sure I’ll eventually have to renegotiate this, too, not for any cost reason but because there’s no way the amount of drip coffee I drink could possibly be healthy.
The whole experience has me entirely bought in on the idea of third places (on a technicality, coffee shops are my second place, but the idea still applies). There’s a good chance that my partner and I move cities in the next year, so a post-move priority will be trying to figure out where my second and third places will be.
Automate what can be automated
I’ll write another, longer post about this, but leveraging automation technology was a massive boon for the Season of Rhythm (and almost entirely responsible for its follow-up, Season of Systems). What was interesting, though, was the inversion of responsibility that I saw when automating certain tasks.
A good example of this was my sleep. My original rationale for a sleep-based automation was to track my time spent actually sleeping without needing to actually muck around with starting a timer when I fell asleep, and stopping it when I woke up. The original automation was simple:
- When I get into bed, I press the Action Button on my phone. This starts a timer for “Winding Down”
- Once I’m ready to actually put my phone away and close my eyes, I put my phone on the wireless charger for the night. This starts a timer for “Sleeping”
- When I wake up in the morning, I take my phone off the charger. This starts the timer for “Morning Routine”.
That was the original intention — just something to function as a shorthand for starting and stopping timers. However, that formed the scaffold for what, ultimately, ended up being the major source of routine in my life.
That stemmed from extensibility of the event-based shortcut triggers, usually in a series of little odds-and-ends, nice-to-haves that accrued over the course of two years:
- I already have a habit of starting sleep mode with a button. Why not use that to automatically redshift my phone’s screen so it’s not as bright at night?
- I hooked my bedside fan to my Home Assistant instance, so why not have that trigger when I put away my phone for the night? I like to have my fan on for a bit as I fall asleep, so that’d be a nice incentive to put my phone away sooner.
- I’d like to be able to set my alarm to go off later on weekends when I can, while being able to wake up earlier if I have an early work appointment on my calendar, so why not set the time on my alarm as part of my sleep shortcut?
The time tracking was just the trunk of the tree — after that, there’s no limit to the ornaments you can hang on the branches. This made it the most durable of all my habits — I believe I’ve missed only a dozen or so days of setting the sleep shortcut in the two years since I started.
Building on Systems
It was these habits sticking for so long that disproved a strange misconception about my own self that I had when I started — “am I incapable of consistent rhythm in my life?” It feels very satisfying to know that, yes, I am capable of routine and habit. Not through white-knuckling things, or beating myself up when I miss a day, but by surrounding myself with durable systems that incentivize routine participation.
That’s one of the many rationales for establishing the season of systems as the rational follow-up. I was mulling around for a bit “what’s the difference between having rhythm, and having systems?” — I don’t want to just do the same thing for another season, after all, and die on the hill of semantics. The distinction in my mind is that rhythm felt like some intrinsic ability to stick to habits, while systems is a follow-up emphasizing what I’m actually good at: building systems that are durable enough to last for years, that I can lean on for support and course correction.