How to Create Your Best Seasonal Schedule

Have you ever noticed that a routine that worked perfectly a few months ago suddenly stops working? Or wondered why certain times of the year feel productive and energized while others leave you struggling just to keep up?

Many of us try to create one ideal schedule that will work all year long, but life doesn't operate that way. Our energy, responsibilities, capacity, and priorities naturally shift throughout the year and throughout different stages of life. Instead of forcing ourselves into a rigid routine, what if we created schedules that worked with our seasons instead of against them?

In this episode, Lisa explores how to build a seasonal schedule that reflects both your season of life and the rhythms of the calendar year. She shares a practical framework for assessing your capacity, identifying recurring patterns, and creating flexible schedules that adapt to changing demands while supporting sustainable productivity.

This week, episode 320 of the Positively Living® Podcast explores how to create your best seasonal schedule and shares a step-by-step approach to planning around your energy, capacity, and real-life responsibilities.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand why having more options doesn't always lead to greater freedom.
• Understand the difference between your season of life and the seasons of the year.
• Learn why a single routine often fails to support you throughout the entire year.
• Assess your current life season and identify the demands affecting your capacity.
• Recognize how family, career, caregiving, and personal transitions impact scheduling.
• Map the natural rhythms and recurring patterns that shape your year.
• Identify the seasons when you feel most energized, productive, and focused.
• Discover how to match tasks and projects to your available energy and bandwidth.
• Learn why capacity is about more than just time management.
• Create seasonal versions of your schedule that adapt to changing circumstances.
• Identify what to prioritize, protect, and release during different seasons.
• Build flexibility into your planning without sacrificing consistency.
• Use regular reviews and course corrections to keep your schedule aligned with your current reality.
• Learn when to simplify your planning and focus on day-to-day management during periods of overwhelm.
• Create sustainable systems that evolve as your life and responsibilities change.

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Learn more about Positively LivingⓇ and Lisa at https://positivelyproductive.com/podcast/

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Episode 119: How Productivity is Impacted by Seasonal Energy

Episode 306: Planning a Day That Works for You

On-demand training for the Minimum Effective Day technique

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Transcript

Lisa Zawrotny: 0:25

If you've ever felt like your schedule works great in September and completely falls apart in July, or like you're always playing catch up after a holiday break, or that the version of your life that fits neatly into a routine somehow disappears every single June, this episode is for you. You are listening to the Positively Living Podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Zawrotny, founder of Positively Productive Systems, and a productivity coach certified in positive psychology and stress management. Join me as we explore ways to live a more proactive, positive life with episodes on productivity, self-awareness, mindset, entrepreneur life habits and systems, simplicity, fun, and more. I understand overwhelm personally as a multi-passionate entrepreneur, wife and mom to kids and cats, and as a caregiver. I'm here to help you choose what's right for you, so you can do less, live more, and breathe easier sound good. Let's get to it. Welcome to the Positively Living Podcast. I'm your host, Lisa, and today we're getting practical as I take you through planning prompts in episode 119 How productivity is impacted by seasonal energy. I shared why your energy and capacity shift so dramatically depending upon the time of your life or the time of year. That episode lays the foundation for what we're talking about today. That episode gives you the why, but today we're covering the how. If you've ever felt like your schedule works great in September and completely falls apart in July, or like you're always playing catch up after a holiday break, or that the version of your life that fits neatly into a routine somehow disappears every single June. This episode is for you. When you plan a seasonal schedule, you're building one that reflects differences in your seasons, one that accounts for who you are right now, what your life looks like right now, or in that season, and what each season of the year actually demands from you. Does that sound good to you? Then let's go through the steps to plan your seasonal schedule. Before we get into the specific steps, we need to make a distinction about the term seasonal, because we're actually working with two different kinds of seasons that overlap and need to work together. The first is your season of the year, the one you probably think of the most: spring, summer, fall, winter, right? Each one carries different energy with different weather, different demands, different rhythms. The second is your season of life, where you are in the arc of your career. What's going on with your family and your capacity within each? Are you in the thick of caregiving, building something new, navigating a transition, finally in a steadier stretch, guiding kids through school, sports? These two seasons interact constantly. Summer looks very different if you have school-age kids than if you're an empty nester. Back to school hits differently if you're launching a business with teens than if you're in a stable career with kids in college. The holiday season carries different weight depending upon what else is happening in your life and with your family, so before we get into the steps, it helps to hold both of these seasons in mind, since your seasonal schedule needs to account for both, and it's very specific to you and your life. Step one is assessing your life season, you're not opening your calendar yet, you're getting honest about where you are in your life right now. Are you in the early years of caregiving, for example, with little ones at home, school drop-offs, activities that require you to be there? They can't just be left somewhere, you need to be with them. Tons of forms and permission slips, and that intense kind of mental load that comes with keeping small humans alive and thriving. Are you further along with teenagers who have their own schedules that somehow still consume yours, that is, their social life makes you a chauffeur, but they also ignore you quite a bit too, and can be other places on their own. Ask me, how I know, or are you past that season entirely, with more autonomy and fewer external demands on your time, more flexibility? Are you building something new, like a business, or delving into a creative project, or in the middle of a career pivot that requires more from you right now than maybe it will in a year or a few years. Are you in a maintenance phase where the systems are mostly working and the goal is to sustain that? Your answers matter because the same calendar season hits completely differently depending upon your life season. Some are for a mom. With school age kids is often more demanding, not less. Summer for someone without kids at home might genuinely be slower and more spacious, because everyone else is slowing down and enjoying the season too. Conversely, for folks with school age kids, September can feel like a relief and be energizing as you all get back to a routine, but if you've had a slower summer, getting back to it in September might be challenging and require more energy of you. Those are the things you want to identify, along with the energy demands of each of them. Ask yourself, what phase of life am I in right now? Caregiving, building, maintaining, transitioning. What are the concerns? consistent external demands in my life that don't flex much? School schedules, work deadlines, family commitments. Has my life season shifted recently in a way that my schedule hasn't caught up with yet, or I haven't considered for my schedule? What does my capacity feel like during this time of life, is it open and accommodating, generally energized, or is it limited and challenging? Step two is to map the calendar seasons to your reality. See, once you know your life season, you can start looking at the calendar year through that lens. This is still big picture time. This is where you identify the natural ebbs and flows that correspond to your life season and the ones that naturally occur within your community and culture as well. For a mom with school-aged kids, for example, the calendar year has some very distinct rhythms. September is back to routine, there's a surge of energy and structure, but also new schedules, new commitments, a ton of forms, such that the parents feel like they're the ones with the homework, and it demands a focus, but there's a clear framework that helps. It can feel like a second January in a way, it's like sort of this new year in a way, and it can function like one. So, it's a double-edged sword, it's challenging, there's a lot going on, but the structure and the framework, especially coming from schools, can help. October, November starts to fill in to ramp up activities, become more frequent, but then the holidays take over, and no matter what you celebrate, most public schools acknowledge Thanksgiving in the states, and then a holiday break that may involve a combination of Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations and New Year's, at the very least. January repeats that back to routine cycle after this, and then comes what has been nicknamed May Sember. There has been some great videos out there, and it's funny, but it's funny because it's true, because it can be brutal. It's a collision of end of year school chaos, recitals, sports wrap ups, teacher appreciation, field trips, teachers being done, and I don't blame them, and the general feeling that everyone needs something from you at once, and that can be exacerbated by your season of life. For example, for me, I have a high school senior this year, so all of these things hold true, plus extra senior events and an extra emotional weight too, because he's graduating. So, May can hit like December, but without all the holiday magic, but hopefully better weather now. Summer arrives, and depending upon your kid's age and your work situation, it's either a welcome time to breathe and finally not feel so many demands, or a logistical puzzle you're constantly solving. You have camp schedules, and that whole situation is something you had to figure out months ago. So, that was a different demand. You have childcare gaps, a lack of routine, which can throw us all off. Kids who need snacks every few minutes, despite the fact that, while they were in school, they did just fine for hours, and the wildness that warmer weather can bring, as well. Those are the demands of a season known for being a quote vacation. The math is not mathing for that one, but that's what you need to consider when you're planning. And once you get through that, September arrives again, and the cycle resets. So, this is just one example of how the year might cycle naturally, your version may look different. Maybe your busiest season is tied to your industry, for example, tax season, or Q, or quarterly reports, product launches, things like that. Or maybe it's tied to a family pattern. If you're a caregiver for elderly parents, you may have ones who need more support in the winter, with summer as the quietest stretch. As you can see, the goal here is to create your own map of the year, depending upon what's going on in your life. So, questions you want to ask yourself, When do I historically. Feel most energized and focused throughout the year, you know. What are the circumstances that allow me to really dig in and make things happen? Conversely, when do things tend to fall apart and feel unmanageable? Where I feel most overwhelmed. What external events, like school, work, family, health-related things, shift my capacity and shift it the most. Remember, we all work differently, so something that may seem fine for someone else can be really overwhelming to you. Are there seasons I keep planning for wrong, expecting them to be easier or simpler than they actually are? That's May Sember for me. Where can I back off to make things go smoother? Now, in step three, you're going to match your tasks to your capacity. This is where scheduling starts to get real, because capacity isn't just about time available, it's about energy levels, your bandwidth, and what you actually have to give mentally, physically, and emotionally, and I touched upon a few of those things in some of my examples. A schedule that works in September, when you're energized and structured, will not work as well in December when you're depleted and overstretched, and there are so many more holiday demands. And a schedule that accounts for summer's more flexible rhythm won't optimize your time once fall comes, and you have more structure available for each season of life, and the calendar, you're asking yourself, What can I realistically place here that I can sustain, not what's ideal or even what worked last time, but what fits this season with this version of me, you've asked yourself the questions, and now it's time to get realistic and apply the answers to your schedule, paying close attention to the traps, like where you historically overextend yourself and where you may need to back off. This also may mean accepting that it will be a while before you can get back to a passion project or incorporate as much as you'd like into your schedule. You have certain expectations sometimes of who you are and what you can accomplish, and this can be humbling. Sometimes acceptance is the most important aspect of creating a schedule that will truly work for you. For our mom with school age kids example, in the school year, there's more predictable time blocks, like school hours, that offer you windows of opportunity you won't find in the summer. You're going to have to create your own. The school time comes with more logistics, carpool, homework hours, activities. In the summer, the approach changes. Maybe early mornings, before kids are up, becomes your most protected time, and where you can get the most done. Maybe you batch work differently. Maybe some things simply need to pause. You will find creating some form of temporary routine will help, by the way, but it might look completely different in terms of hours for you than it does in the rest of the year. I highly recommend a summer schedule if you can do that, and to create some sort of book end of the day like you would have during the year. It can be helpful to keep some semblance of a routine going, but again, it's going to need to look very different. Capacity means strategic placement of more demanding tasks when it feels possible, like I was saying, when you're in a more energized time. So, if given the choice, Maycember is not the time to launch a new project or to start a new creative endeavor. Back to school might not be the time to add something new to your family's demands, but it might be awesome for you, knowing your low capacity seasons in advance, as well as your high capacity, means you can protect them in two different ways, you can protect them and optimize them instead of overloading them and wondering why everything feels so difficult. Questions to ask yourself, what does my available time actually look like in each season, not theoretically but realistically? And this is available time to do tasks that match. When is my energy highest, and what tasks or projects will fit that? Where are there options for me? What can flex, and what areas need to be protected? I think this is especially important. We want to talk about high energy and low energy, but I think sometimes it's important to be conservative and default to the low energy, so find the times that need to be protected the most, where you will be the most overwhelmed and the least able to accomplish things, and conservatively plan in those times. That one step alone will make a difference. All right. Step four is building the schedule around all of this, the. You've discovered now it's time to open your calendar with your life season identified, your calendar rhythms mapped out, and your capacity assessed and matched to what you want to add and accomplish. You can start building a seasonal schedule that will make the most of your energy, instead of trying to find a perfect routine that works all year in the name of being consistent, because I understand that's a good thing to do. Consistency is so important when we want to establish habits, but this time it's about having a few seasonal versions of your schedule that you can rotate into intentionally, so it's consistency within the seasons that you're allowed to change each one is designed for the specific demands and available energy of that period, so it's okay to change because this is an intentional, specific, and temporary for each seasonal schedule. You're identifying what stays consistent, no matter what, your non-negotiables, your work hours, unless you have vacation, are going to be the same. What shifts based on available time and energy? This could be passion projects, it could be the way you have a routine during the day that's different when kids are in school versus on summer vacation. What you're intentionally releasing during low capacity seasons, you know you're going to do fewer volunteer projects, perhaps during May, December, and when you're more available in the fall, you can get back to your volunteer work. What do you want to protect and prioritize when your capacity is higher? That's fun too. When you can look forward to a time where you know you can get back to things that matter to you, you're creating a flexible framework that you return to and adjust as your seasons change. Now, in every productivity discussion we have on the podcast, we talk about continuous review and course correction. It's so important that you understand one and done is not a thing here, because our focus is sustainable productivity, and the only way things can be sustainable is if they flex with the changes of life. In the same way, your seasonal schedule is not a document you create once and file away, even though they're for different seasons, and they may be accurate, each of those seasonal planning approaches is a living thing, because your life season will shift. Kids grow up, jobs change, health changes, circumstances change, things we couldn't anticipate come at us, and we need to flex with it. What works now may not work in three years or sometimes even three weeks. Life moves forward, and when it does, you want to allow your planning to move with it. When you experience a big life shift, that's a great sign to take a look at your planning. Be sure to step back and adjust your schedule, but even if life is going along as usual. I would recommend returning to the questions here regularly, maybe even seasonally, simply to check in with yourself and make sure everything is still working. Even 15 minutes at the start of a new season to revisit your rhythm can make a meaningful difference. You can make these small tweaks that will make it even better the next time, and as you go through a season, sometimes documenting what worked and what didn't, that's a fantastic way you debrief after a season, and you're like, okay, lessons learned, what can I do differently next time that will make this so much better, and this process is all about learning how to schedule with your season in mind, so this can be a learning curve, and when you have a learning curve, and your original approach was to push hard, break down, and feel like you failed. Well, this may take some time for you to get it right, and that's okay. See, now you're being compassionate and intentional, and that's going to take some tries, but knowing you can adjust means it's okay to try it, to assess and to adjust. I can remember for years, and I mean years. I would still overbook myself in May, December. I would plan things I had no business putting on the calendar during this time, thinking that I wanted to batch projects before the summer, thinking I would be able to manage this because my kids were getting older, they're teens now, so they're more independent. Whew, lesson learned every single season. I'm not even sure I got it that right this year, because again, I have a high school senior, and so that was a different kind of overwhelm, so I'd get to May, and I'd wonder what I was thinking, and I'd make adjustments, and I'm getting better, and I've forgiven myself for the optimist in me. It's okay, I just keep adjusting. One thing I want to note about this is, you can do your best with the planning, you can make adjustments, you can have those lessons learned, but if you find. Self deeply overwhelmed, you may need to reduce not just what's on your schedule, but the scope of the planning itself, and what I mean by that is, in extreme overwhelm, you may need to step way back and take it one day at a time. Don't worry about the seasonal scheduling now, you want to adjust your day, maybe your week, until you can find a rhythm that works for what's going on right now. This is especially true when you have some kind of major trauma, but sometimes it can simply be a shift in your capacity. Something can be overwhelming. This is where emotional demands may come into play. You know, something's going on that you didn't anticipate. So, in today's episode we're talking about the bigger picture planning, but sometimes you need to plan that day or week at a time and just keep it really simple. When you need to downshift fast, you want to use something like my minimum effective day technique. You can find out more about that in episode 306 on planning a day that works for you, and you'll find on-demand training on how to do that on the resources page of the website, Positively productive.com/resources If this approach is a big change from how you've been planning, I recommend starting with one season, choose the next one coming up, or one that consistently trips you up, if that feels easier, or maybe more effective. Sometimes, when we start something new, taking an easier approach can be great as an entry point to feel successful. Sometimes, what motivates us more is doing something that's really challenging, and then when we achieve that, we get that into place, we feel a lot better. That's going to be a choice that you make. Both of those can work really well as an entry point to this. Whichever you choose, ask yourself the questions in each step that we talked about today, and set up some rules for planning that will make it more successful. If you need more support doing this, you have a couple of options. I'll have episodes 119 and 306 linked in the show notes for you to listen to, and I have an intro coaching offer that would be an effective low-risk way for you to get support in identifying your seasons and getting started on this approach, head to Positively productive.com/clarity-call or you can also find a link to the Clarity call on the coaching page of the website as well. Book a time, and we'll figure out what your seasonal schedule could look like together.