Late November always sneaks up on me.
In Japan, it's the time of "cold north winds blow the leaves from the trees." In business, it's when calendars start to look like overstuffed suitcases. Performance reviews. Compensation conversations. Year-end customer check-ins squeezed in before everyone disappears for the holidays.
A few years ago, I stumbled onto Japan's microseasons. 72 tiny slices of the year, each about five days long, with names like "first frost" and "bears retreat to their dens." They're precise. Observant. Human.
And I remember thinking: work has microseasons too.
There's the week after Labor Day, when inboxes suddenly wake up and everyone pretends summer never happened. The strange lull between Christmas and New Year's, where big decisions get made by small teams while everyone else is offline. The anxious energy of late March, when sales teams either sprint or panic toward quarter-end.
Each company and industry is different. But if you look closely, I bet the microseasons are there. A rhythm hiding inside the chaos.
Just like I never noticed the return of the swallows in early April until someone pointed it out, you're probably overlooking microseasons in your own work. The quiet weeks that are actually the best time to ship. The loud weeks where nothing gets decided anyway.
What microseason are you in right now?