What season are you in?

This Week, For Us | Issue #003

Jun 19, 2026

I spent the first part of this year deliberately slow.

It seemed like everything around me was moving at hyper speed, and there was more pressure than ever to do more, more, more.

After 10 years of always focusing on the next thing I had to do to grow my business, I realized I needed to take a minute. So I did.

But now all the lessons have settled. All the naps and weekends off have started to catch up, and I’m starting to feel that fire and excitement to build and grow.

In the planning process I teach, I talk about the four seasons business owners need to recognize and how identifying which season you’re in can be a life-changing planning hack.

The four business seasons:

Building — focused time to create infrastructure: new offers, systems, workflows.
Maintaining — steady-state operations: delivering, supporting, admin, recurring tasks.
Growing — increasing visibility, scaling efforts, launching, momentum-building.
Resting — recovery after a sprint, a pause between chapters, or a low-capacity season.

When left to my own devices, I tend to push myself relentlessly to keep building and growing, without taking time to rest or maintain.

But we’re simply not designed to operate that way.

A season of rest can be as short as a week if that’s all you need. The key is to proactively identify which season you’re in, and make sure you’re cycling through all of them.

Next week I’m sharing my Epic Guide on quarterly planning for solopreneurs — a step-by-step process to go through before July 1st to:

Get crazy clear on your North Star
Identify the top one to three strategies that will get you there
Create an action plan that feels effortless to get done (ok, not effortless but it’s clear and easy to take action)

Q3 for me is definitely going to be a growing season. Next week, I’ll take myself through the planning process to get super clear on the exact outcomes, milestones, and actions I’m going to focus on for the next three months.

And of course, I’ll share the process with you in the Epic Guide, in case you’d like to do the same.

Maybe you’ve heard…

The week’s highlights in AI, systems, and business.

👾 Claude Design got an upgrade.

Claude Design first launched April 17, 2026 and, honestly, it fell a little flat when it first came out because people didn’t really know how to use it. If you go to Claude Design and ask it to help you design your brand without specific instructions, it does an okay job.

With specific instructions, though? It’s one of the most helpful tools for solopreneurs. Once your design system is set up you can design any asset you need for your business in about 10 seconds.

And it now lets you edit directly on the canvas, syncs with Claude Code, and exports to PDF/PowerPoint and tools like Canva.

🤖 AI scheduling is getting really good

For a long time, AI only did anything when you sat down and asked it.

Now Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini can all run tasks on a schedule, on their own. You describe a job once — pull together a Monday summary, draft my weekly email, check these numbers every Friday — and it does it, on time, without you.

I’ve gotten a little obsessed with it. I built out my whole system inside Cowork to take the repeating parts of my week off my hands and I am blown away.

This is the video that got me inspired: My Simple Claude Cowork System (for normal people).

And of course I’ll share how I did it soon.