Founders need seasons

Why startup founders should work like farmers, not factory workers

I'm writing this while enjoying a much-needed holiday.

This year has been a big one - both professionally and personally - and I have been intentional to take the time out to recharge before what promises to be another season of intense hard work.

As a founder of a business exploring the limits of Large Language Models, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand how this technology will impact work.

I have been reflecting about the changing features of work - how humans work schedules have been defined as much by social norms as by technology:

- Nomadism gave way to farming

- Farming gave way to factories

- Factories to office work

- Office work to a universal basic income and endless leisure ... just kidding.

But something that was lost in the move from farming to factories was seasons.

Human lives used to be governed, on a day to day basis, by the seasons. Both in hunter-gatherer and farming societies, people's daily tasks depended heavily on what season it was - the season effectively defined what was being done, but also, importantly, provided variety throughout the year - you're unlikely to be harvesting much grain when the fields are covered in snow.

If you had a lot of hard, manual work bringing the harvest in in Autumn, you knew that it would be followed by months of cold in winter when you could make tools, repairs and enjoy more sleep due to the shorter days.

This seasonal variety meant that you didn't have to work on the same task for long periods of time. You got to do different things, master different crafts and enjoy more time off depending on the time of year.

The variety this afforded helped to make each period more bearable - rather than looking into the foreseeable future working on the same task, you could instead look forward a much more reasonable amount of time (weeks) to a change (often demarcated by a festival - Easter, Midsummer, Halloween, Christmas).

I believe that we're programmed as humans to work well in 10-15 week blocks of intense work. The changing of the seasons forms a natural cadence to work (regardless of hunter-gather or farming). "Work" and "life" didn't need to have the same distinction - they could blend together into one occupation. Due to the monotony of office work, lacking a work <> life distinction is immensely draining.

Pre-industrialisation, you could have periods of intense work - eg. harvest - followed by periods of rest - winter. You always knew that the work intensity would go up and down, but the predictable cadence reduced the monotony.

So, how does this relate to startups?

Biologically, founders are the same as farmers.

As a startup founder, you need to be across everything: sales, product, marketing, investment.

But working hard consistently, on all tasks, is the path to burnout.

I propose that startup founders need to introduce the concept of seasons to their work.

Have a season of "product", where your mental focus is given as much as possible to product and feature improvements. The season ends once a logical "feature release" has been reached (and set this date at least 12 weeks in advance).

Follow this with a festival - it has to be a proper celebration with your team, partner or other cofounders - and during this time you can take a short holiday break. Then with the change of season, focus on something else: marketing, sales, investment - but it's got to be something different to your previous season. No two adjacent seasons should be on the same focus.

The variety is important - punctuated by periods of intentional rest and celebration.

And it's OK to have periods of incredibly intense work, followed by periods of lower intensity - just make sure that you're disciplined about when those periods start and finish.

I like the seasonal concept because seasons don't have a fixed end *date* per-se - sometimes winter comes early, sometimes autumn is late, summers can be long.

But equally, the changing of the seasons is inevitable. Autumn can be a week or two late, but it's going to come.

Use this concept in your work-life as a founder - you don't need to beat yourself up over missing that deadline: the launch, the sales target etc. But you do need to get the crops in before winter comes. And the prospect of missing the change of seasons should scare you as existentially as it did your farming ancestors.