How to Plan Your Fall to Change Your Life

A week is too short to change your life, a year is too long to plan, but a season is short enough to plan and long enough to actually make a difference. And no matter how much you fight the pumpkin spice, live laugh lover that lives inside of you, we all know my girl Jordan Baker and the great Gatsby was right when she said life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. How to plan your fall to change your life, let's talk about it. So gum. Welcome back to SoulGum, the self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological and literary flair. I'm your host Victoria Hutchins, my goal is to give your soul something to chew on and today we have a seasonal episode. I am going to walk you through the exact five step fall planning method that I use to reset my life and recalibrate myself towards my goals and the philosophy and psychology behind why it works. And I am so excited today's episode is a mashup of two of my favorite things. The first thing obviously is fall. I try to be cool for y'all, but at the end of the day I am a pumpkin spice ass bitch. If you ever want to trap me, you ever want to make a trap that I will fall into, here's exactly what you're going to do, step one, you are going to make a fort. You might put some twinkly fairy lights in or around the fort. Step two, you're going to take a laptop, put the laptop in the fort, put on some fall adjacent media. It could be Gilmore Girls, it could be practical magic. Step three, you're going to do the mouse cheese stick trap thing, but instead of cheese, you're going to use cinnamon rolls. Give it a few minutes, check the trap, my ass will be in there. I love fall. And the other thing I love is changing my life. I love goals, okay, sue me, we've talked about this, inside me, there are two wolves. The first wolf is a soft girl who wants a soft life. The second wolf is named Chad. I try with the soft life stuff, I really do. Sometimes it resonates with me, sometimes I feel content with what I have. But most of the time, I am rabidly ambitious and irrevocably scrappy and I want to change my life. Is that so wrong? Maybe you clicked on this episode because there is some big change that is trying to claw its way out of you, you really want to start the business or move to the new city, you want to quit your job, maybe you have some big creative goal, you want to write the book, you want to start posting content, you want to apply for the artist's residency. Or maybe you are not looking for some dramatic reinvention this fall. Maybe you just want your life to feel like 15% less chaotic. You want to actually get to the stuff on your list that you don't owe to anyone else, but you want to do for yourself, you want to do your skincare, you want to do the yoga, you want to take the walk, you want to make yourself dinner before you are so starving that you black in and find yourself like eating shredded cheese over the sink. You want to look around sometime in November and be like, oh, I'm actually living my life the way I want to be living it. If any of that sounds like you, you are in exactly the right place and I made this episode for you, maybe you are feeling like how are two thirds of the year already done? Should I just mail it in this year, should I just try to be my best self in 2027? But I think this is the perfect time to reset and recommit. I for one for the first 21 years of my life spent this time of year plotting my next self. This time, every year, I had my new binders, I had my fresh pencils with my fresh erasers, I had a fresh, crispy new outfit on my bed for the first day of school that I had picked out for three weeks. I was telling myself, Victoria, this is the year. This is the year your personality gets to mirror and mysterious instead of chaotic. You are not going to give stitch from Leelow and Stitch this year. You are not going to give those two little demons from Hercules. You are going to be like Hillary Duff in a Cinderella story. You are going to be like Bella from Twilight. If they knew you last school year, they don't anymore. Doing that every year, wired my brain to see this as like rebrand season. And psychologically, a season is the perfect unit of time for habit change. It shows that the average time for automaticity for a new habit, meaning the point at which a new habit becomes automatic, it becomes second nature, is somewhere in the realm of 66 to 90 days. A season is roughly 90 days long. So you have enough time to start something new and make meaningful change, actually form a habit. But unlike a year, you are not planning so far in the future that you don't even know the you you're planning for. Today, I'm going to walk you through the exact five step planning method that I do at the start of every season. And I'm going to get gritty with it. This might be a bit of a longer episode. The first time I ever did this planning system was in 2023. I sat down with my husband. We mapped out the next four months of our life using this planning system and my life changed more dramatically than I ever could have imagined during those four months. I changed so much that in July, I put in notice for my job as an attorney, avenues to live my passions unfurled in ways I never could have expected. And as almost always when someone's life changes in the dramatic way that mine did, there was luck and privilege involved, of course, but what I didn't understand until it happened to me about what I can control is that what actually breaks you through thresholds is not brute force, it's not raw motivation and discipline. It is having systems that allow you to move towards your next most aligned self without force. Not to get all James clear on you, but I'm going to be walking you through that system today. But this podcast is not the world according to Victoria. So we are also going to be getting into the philosophy and psychology behind why this system works. We'll talk about Simone de Beaufort, Nietzsche, ancient Greek philosophy. And I even made you a worksheet for this episode, isn't that cute? So gum is typically very much for the thought daughters, but today I'm not going to lie we're getting a little girlbossy. Getting girlboss, let's change our lives. What if you flop, girlboss, what if you fly? I'll stop. But I figured why not double down on the girlbossiness of it all and make a worksheet. It'll be totally free. I'll put it in like Google driver something. I don't know. I'll figure it out. Check the show notes. If you're driving or cleaning or like low key listening while you work and you want to do this system another time, you have all the information laid out for you. My hope is that by the time this episode is done, you will feel crystal clear on how to plan your fall to make this fall a turning point, whether that is in a big dramatic way or in a subtle recalibrating way. If it's your first time listening to soul gum, I'm a Victoria. It's so nice to meet you. I am a writer. My debut poetry collection make believe is out now I am a social media content creator on TikTok and Instagram. I'm the host of this podcast, obviously, and I'm so happy you're here. If you're not new here, hi, what's up? Maybe you already know that soul gum is ad free all season long as a gift from me to you and I have paid for it, okay, not to to my own horn, but it is a choice to keep this podcast ad free. And I'm choosing it right now. I can't promise you forever, but I don't want to read ads any more than you want to listen to them. So if you see me hollering for a dollar on social media, know that it's because I'm keeping this space pure and untainted by that energy. And if you like that, if you want to help me keep soul gum ad free, five things you can do to help. Number one, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast. This episode is all about systems. If you like the podcast, why not do that for yourself? So you don't have to go tight me up and look me up, I show up in your home page without you having to do anything. Number two, take 10 seconds and rate the podcast five stars wherever you're listening. Number three, if you enjoy this episode, consider sharing it. You could share it with a friend who you want to do this system with. You want to like lock in and do a fall reset with. You could post it, pop it on your Instagram story, put it in your next dump. I love it when you do that. If you do, I just made an Instagram for the podcast, it is at soul gum podcast. So if you share anything on social media, tag, soul gum podcast. And while you're at it, consider following soul gum podcasts. You're listening to this episode right now because I did a poll on the soul gum podcast Instagram story and asked which episode you wanted to see an accident. This is what you chose. So if you want to have a say in things like that, join me there. And number five, one thing about me, my ass loves the comment. I love to hear from you all. I love to talk to you. I want to know what's coming up for you. As you listen to this episode, what goals you have for this fall, if you're going back to school, if you're starting a new job, if you have a new creative goal, I make this podcast for you. I want it to be what you like. And I also just like to understand you. So talk to me. Let's get into the episode and dive into the five step philosophically and psychologically back system to plan your fall to change your life. Starting with step one. Beyond it, listen, I know you're in a girl boss mood right now. I know you want me to tell you that what you need to do is buy a new planner, maybe a new journal, maybe a water bottle and sprint off in the sunset towards your goals. But unfortunately, we have to reckon with our past first. If you have read any existentialist philosophy, you have probably noticed how obsessed the existentialist are with freedom. 20th century French philosopher Jean Paul torture at talks about how we are condemned to be free. 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard talks about the dizziness of freedom. 20th century French philosopher Albert Camus says, can this be happiness? This terrifying freedom? They're so dramatic these men. Leave it to a woman to appreciate new months. 20th century French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir came in and said, yeah, we're free, but we're never just free. We are always exercising out freedom within the context of everything that came before us. And the choices we've already made in her 1947 work, the ethics of ambiguity. Simone de Beauvoir describes this as a tension between facticity and transcendence. Facticity is the existing circumstances of your life, both in terms of the identity and immutable traits you were assigned at birth. And the choices you have already made and now live inside the job you currently have, your current relationship status, your current habits, your existing social scripts. On the other hand, transcendence is your ability to reach beyond your facticity and choose something different. You are always the last version of your past selves and the first version of your future selves. And this is a really good philosophical starting point as we think about how to plan our fall because most of us have a tendency to pretend one side of this facticity transcendence equation does not exist. Some of us get a little too attached to our facticity. We say things like, well, I've never been a morning person. I am just bad with money. I can't stick to a routine. That is just how I am. And some of us, I'm looking at myself, get a little drunk on transcendence. I am someone when I am staring down the barrel of a new season, a new month, a new year, I get possessed by the spirit of Rachel Hollis. Go watch your face, girl. I think that starting September 1st, despite all evidence to the contrary, I am going to suddenly become the type of person who wakes up at 5 30 a.m. Does my full of strong yoga practice six days a week, makes an elaborate breakfast for myself every day, cooks myself a beautiful dinner from whole foods and ingredients. I'd go to the farmer's market every Sunday to buy these ingredients. I read 50 pages a night and I go to bed by 9 p.m. Have I met myself? Regardless of which side of that equation you fall on, what someone to boob are saying is, we can't do either. Your past is real, but it isn't your fate. Your freedom to choose something different in the future is real, but it has to start with the context of who you are now. So before we set a bunch of goals of where we want to go this fall, we have to start with our facticity. We have to look at the evidence of the life that we've actually been living. I'm going to give you a specific audit, but as you do it, I want you to try to do it with as little judgment as possible. And one thing that psychology research shows is really helpful in not being an asshole to yourself as you look back on your life is self-distancing. As you're doing this audit that we're about to talk about, I want you to think about yourself in third person. This is proven to help us eliminate losses. We're looking back on our choices and analyze our choices in the circumstances of our life more neutrally, meaning we are able to see patterns that we might not be able to otherwise. So here's the audit I do. It has two main parts, looking at your plans and looking at what happened. First, I look at any plans or goals I made at the start of the year, or if I did this last season at the start of the last season. If you made any new year's resolutions, get them out. If you made a vision board, pull it out. If you wrote in your journal in January about your hopes for the year, take a look at that. And as you look at that, ask yourself, what did you think this year was going to be about? What did you plan to prioritize? What did January you think was going to be a big part of your life? If you set measurable goals, take a look at where you are on them, where two thirds of the way through the year, are you two thirds towards those goals? But don't just look at whether you are on track or not. Also, ask yourself, where was January me wrong? What does that data tell you about where you were realistic with your goals and where you weren't? Are there places where you're not on track? But it's not because you haven't been getting after it. It's because January you was goal-bossing too close to the sign. Ask yourself, which goals still matter to me? Which ones don't? Where do I have new goals that aren't reflected on this list? What came out of nowhere in 2026? What was January you not thinking about that this you was thinking about a lot? So that's the first part, looking at the goals that we set. Second part, look at what actually happened. I like to start with my notes app here. Hi, this is Editoria. I said no set. I'm a camera roll. Sorry. So scroll all the way back to January and slowly scroll forward and notice what you see. Who has been in your life? Where have you gone? What have you done for the first time? What did the really good days where you wanted to capture the whole day? What do those days look like? What does your camera roll show you about what you find beautiful and meaningful? Do you have a million photos of nature? Do you have a million photos of your dog and your person or your best friend? What periods of the year so far are full of activity full of photos and which ones barely exist, which ones are dead zones? Maybe you can see evidence of painful stuff like there's someone who is all up in your camera roll for a few months and then nowhere to be found. Notice that maybe your camera roll is 90% stuff for school or work like photos of class notes or screenshots of like your jobs shift calendar. Notice that if you have other evidence of how you actually have spent your time so far this year, it could be your outlet calendar or your Gmail calendar. It could be your planner. If you keep a planner, you might scroll through your notes app and see what you've been writing down so far this year. Maybe you have to log hours for your job. Maybe you take a look through your Instagram stories archive. Last part of getting your arms around what has happened. Look at any outward manifestations of the fruits of your labor. So this could be your money. It could be your bank account. It could be pieces of creative work that you've made. Feedback on something that you've done that felt meaningful to you. Now considering all of that, what you planned for the year and what actually happened. The New Year's resolutions, the goals, the camera roll, the notes app, all of it. This is where you step into your third person investigator mode and start to notice patterns and incongruencies between your choices and your goals and your goals and your well-being. What you say will make you happy versus what actually does. Get on your Kylie Jenner shit, your year of noticing and realizing things. I support her. That makes perfect sense to me. Maybe you say you want to be in this big friend group and you're hustling to try to be in it. But every time you've seen them this year, you have like a photo of yourself crying in your car or a sad little notes app poem about how you feel you don't belong. Maybe you have accomplished almost everything career wise that you have endeavored to this year and you notice that it hasn't made you particularly happy. You have screenshots of some big financial win or a bunch of photos from a celebratory dinner and you recall feeling nothing. Maybe it's the opposite of that. Maybe you've been grinding and it feels good. You're on your fort minor 10% look, 50% skill, 15% concentrated power of will. Maybe you can see that there's evidence that there's something you're thinking about a time you are researching it and planning but never actually going for it. And I want you to get something from this audit down on paper. It does not have to be my elaborate worksheet. It could be as simple as opening your notes up writing number one. My goals were number two. What happened was number three. What felt good? Number four. What didn't? Number five. What now? So step one is the audit. Taking a look at what Simone de Beauvoir would call your "facticity." The facts of your life where you actually are. Which brings me to step two. The purge. Before you get scared, I'm not going to make you hold every object that you own and ask whether it's Parkstoy. Though I have done that. Another person who's spirit possesses me from time to time is Maricondo. I read Maricondo's book in 2019 and it sent me into an episode. I would get home from my job as an attorney at midnight and like three hours later my husband boyfriend then would like come into the kitchen like what are you doing? And I would be like standing there holding a pot thinking. Does it? Parktoy. Sorry. We're not going to do that. That extreme minimalism of the late 2010s was a moment in time. But there was something behind it. There is such a thing as having too many options. We have talked on Solgon before about the paradox of choice, which was coined by the psychologist Barry Schwartz. And the paradox is this. We tend to assume that more choices means better. But there is a point where having more choices makes it harder for us to choose and less satisfied with what we do choose. One of the most famous examples demonstrating this is the Stanford Jam experiment. Psychologist Shina Iangar and Mark Lepper set up a jam display at a luxury grocery store in California on two different days. One of the days there were six jams. The other day there were 24. And what's interesting is the 24 jam display was way better at getting people's attention. Way more shoppers stop. we really like the idea of abundance, but of the shoppers who stopped at the 24 jam display, only 3% bought a jam. For the shoppers who stopped at the 6 jam display, 30% bought jam. Ten times more. This is something all the existentialists talk about ad nauseam, the idea that at a certain point choice becomes paralyzing. It does not make us freer or make it easier to choose, it makes us stand in the metaphorical jam aisle of our life and pull out our phone and start scrolling TikTok because there are so many jams and we don't know where to start. We experience tiny versions of this everywhere. You open your drawers and they're stuffed and yet you feel like you have nothing to wear, even though you do have stuff you like, it's just buried in a bunch of stuff that you don't wear that doesn't fit and that you don't like. You open your phone because you want to check the weather and you are staring at six pages of apps, New York Times Alert, email notifications, text notifications and like a meditation app reminder to breathe. By the time you close your phone you haven't checked the weather, you forgot what you even opened it for. Both digitally and in our physical spaces, we create environments where everything is presenting itself to us as an option all the time. So when I do step two, the purge, what I'm doing is literally calling my physical and digital spaces, donating clothes that I don't wear, throwing away old makeup products that I have in my makeup bags that are expired and that I don't use, clearing out wherever you keep a bunch of random cords that you don't even know what they go to and they charge and then doing the same thing digitally, deleting apps that you don't use. Most of us do not use more than one page of apps unsubscribing from stuff in your email that you don't actually read. Turning off notifications from apps you do not want notifications from getting a brick or setting up a social media blocker that blocks your social media during certain times of day. And with this step it's really important to not get too ambitious with it because one thing I will do is I will go Rachel Hollis mode with it and think I'm gonna purge my whole closet in a night and then I will black in at some point and it's like 2 a.m. and I'm wearing a sequined dress that I have not worn in five years and like my rain boots and I've tried a million things on and they're all on the floor and I suddenly cannot tolerate this for another moment and I need to sleep and the pile of stuff that I intended to donate sits outside my closet door for like a calendar year. So be incremental with it. Make it doable. Aim to call a few things in your digital landscape and a few things in your physical space every day for the next few weeks and give yourself a cutoff time where when it comes to physical things you have them out of your space. And as you purge I want you to think about the choice architecture of what's left. The term choice architecture was popularized by the economist Richard Taylor and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein in 2008 and it refers to the way your environment is set up to nudge you towards certain choices to make certain choices easier and other choices harder. Companies love this once you're aware of this you'll see it everywhere. It is why streaming services automatically play the next episode before you have time to remember that you have a job. This is the candy at the grocery store. Grocery source know nobody has like a Twix on their shopping list. They want to make it really easy for you to see and get that Twix. This is why our social media feeds auto play and they never end. There is no natural stopping point because social media apps want to make it easy and natural for you to not stop scrolling. This is why source put the products they most want you to buy at I level and at the front of the store. This is why subscribing to anything takes like one or two clicks but then when you want to unsubscribe you have to call someone send an email and like give a blood sample. They want to make it easy to subscribe and hard to unsubscribe. Companies spend billions of dollars designing environments that nudge you towards the choices that they want you to make. So as you are calling and purging your environments you can spend some time thinking about how to set them up to optimize for the choices that you want to make. You are already living inside a choice architecture. Your kitchen has one, your closet has one, your phone has one and often we design these unintentionally. So as you're purging and resetting your physical and digital environments think about how you can set them up to make the choices that you want to make easy and the choices you don't want to make hard. If you want to read more during fall don't put your book on the bookshelf put it on your nightstand. If you want to spend less time on Instagram it probably should not be on your dock right under where your thumb naturally sits every time you open your phone. If you want to practice yoga at home don't leave your mat in your car roll it out and keep it rolled out. So number two the purge asking yourself number one what in my physical and digital environments is creating unnecessary noise and choice. Number two how can I arrange what's left to make the choices that I want to make easier. Which brings me to step three the choice. Now that we've cleared some space we're gonna finally start to think about what we want to do with it. So I want you to think about five goals that you have for this season ahead. Don't overthink it. It could be I want to write this many words on my book. I want to start dating again. I want to train for a race. I want to get my finances organized. I want to start hosting people having people over. I want to travel a lot. Think about your five top goals. Once you have them cut two. You get three. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. You get three. This is the part where we talk about the planning fallacy. This term was first introduced in 1979 by the psychologist Daniel Conman and Amos Varsky and it refers to the human tendency to underestimate how much time and effort things we plan to do are going to take. Research has shown that if you ask people to give a best expected and worst estimate of how long they think something they plan to do is going to take even their worst case estimate is too short. We as humans almost across the board drastically underestimate how long stuff is going to take us and the wild thing is we do this even with stuff that we have done before where we should know and do know how long it takes us. I make a time blocked to do list every single day and as much as I know and talk about this fallacy I still find myself giving things less time in my day than I know they will take so I can try to fit more in. So when we think about planning for fall we sit down and we're like okay this is the season I'm going to be creative. I'm going to write every day. I also want to get really strong. I want to start lifting and I really want to host more. I want to have people over and because I want to have people over I want to get my space how I want it and I want to take good care of myself. I want to be the type of person who like always has a pot of soup that she's made that she has frozen in the fridge. You see how it's kind of spiraling out of control because in theory can you get strong this season? Yeah can you start a creative practice this season? Yeah can you make soup this season? Yeah but can you start writing, start lifting, start hosting people get your space in order and regularly make soup while doing the job you already have and all this stuff you already have to do? Probably not. When we imagine the future we tend to imagine ourselves operating under unusually good conditions. Future me is focused. Future me doesn't get sick. Future me does not get locked out of her accounts and have to do a 30-step account recovery thing. Future me does not have to get her car serviced. She does not spend three hours going in one direction with something that she's writing and then decides she doesn't like it and scrap everything and have to start over. That is what psychologist called the optimism bias. We have a tendency to overestimate positive outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of setbacks and things not going to plan. Part of this I think is that over planning feels really good. The moment you write those five goals down you feel in control and so making this undoable plan for your day or your season is a way of postponing the discomfort of having to pick. It is delaying acknowledgment of the fact that they're simply not room for everything all at once. So number three, the choice. Three big goals. And this brings me to number four, the trade-offs. We're already kind of getting into it. You've got your priorities. Now you have to ask yourself what am I willing for those goals to cost me? By definition, if something is going to get more of your time, something else has to get less. I think women and feminine people in particular are taught to experience that trade-off as a failure. It can feel like in order for your success to count, you have to succeed at everything. The internet has really warped our minds in this way because we are constantly being served specialized content by specialized people and aggregating that into one composite life that we're supposed to have. The fashion content you see is from someone whose entire life is fashion. They spend hours every week looking at clothes, thinking about clothes, trying on clothes, cultivating their taste. Of course, they have better styles than you do. It's their whole thing. Then you scroll and you see someone making a weeknight dinner. That's beautiful and healthy and you're like, I want to make a weeknight dinner. But by the way, that person is a food creator who doesn't have a corporate job. They're making that weeknight dinner in the middle of the day as their day. And then you get home from your job and feel like shit about yourself for like eating a pack of tortillas for dinner. Then you scroll and you see fitness content from someone who fitness is not the thing that they squeeze in before work. It is their work. Every person you see, it feels like it's balls to the walls on something, a maculant house or skincare is their whole thing. They're reading a hundred books a year. They're on a mission to have dinner with a new person every week. And your brain does this really sneaky nasty thing where it collapses all of that into one person that you think you're supposed to be who has the fashion influencers closet and makes the weeknight dinners that the food creator makes and is as fit as the fitness person. That woman that person does not exist. And yet we all feel like we have to be them. And what we're not seeing are the hidden trade-offs of inflating one area of your life and focusing on it so much that it is shiny enough to catch people's attention. And I'm not hating on creators, by the way. I'm saying maybe we can learn from that and release this tyrannical need for impossible balance. In his 1882 work The Gay Science, Nietzsche talks about his love of what he calls brief habits. And he's basically saying, "What's so wrong with a little hyperfixation? What's so wrong with getting a little consumed by something?" Letting a season of your life have a real theme and letting it cost something. He hated the idea of devoting your whole life to one thing. And he thought the worst case of all was having no habits. He called that like worse than an exile to Siberia, so dramatic. And I really love this. I love the idea of giving yourself permission to throw yourself into a season of life fully and let it cost you something, except the trade-offs. So as you think about, what am I willing for this to cost me? Remember, it doesn't have to cost that forever. But it's also important to ask yourself, what am I not willing for this to cost me? Maybe you want to write a book and you are willing for that to cost you a cleaner house. You are willing for that to cost you a little bit more money spent on postmates. You are willing for it to cost you exercising two times a week instead of five times a week. But you're not willing for it to cost you going completely silent on your friends. You're not willing for it to cost you quality time with your person. You're not willing for it to cost you sleeping less than six hours a night. Because there's a difference between what Nietzsche would call a brief habit, letting yourself get a little consumed by something and letting your ambition cannibalize everything that makes that ambition worth something in the first place. So number four, consider the trade-offs. What am I willing for my goals to cost me? What am I not willing for them to cost me? Which brings me to the last step, the time. So we know what we're going to do. Now we figure out when we're going to do it. The ancient Greeks had two different words for time, chronos and chyros. Chronos is clock time, measurable time. Monday at 9 a.m. September 1st, two hours, 90 minutes. This is where we get the word chronological. So first, now that you've gotten your arms around your goals, think about them in terms of chronological actual time. Where are they going to fit in your calendar? One of the easiest ways to sabotage yourself is telling yourself you're going to do a bunch of different stuff, but not deciding when you are going to do it. One thing that has been tremendously helpful for me as a person where my job has a lot of different facets is having a different focus for each day of the week. So on Monday I focus on social media, on Tuesday I focus on SoulGum, on Wednesday I focus on my writing. Your external obligations, the calls that you have for your job, your commitments to others will be scheduled. So if you want your goals to have the same level of priority, you have to schedule them as well. So if you want this to be a season where you make art, there needs to be a time on your calendar that is blocked off for doing that. So block out roughly how you plan to spend your weeks and where the things you want to do are going to fit in your calendar. Another thing to think about when it comes to the cronos of your fall, give it a start and give it an end. The first day of fall is September 22nd, the last day of fall is December 20th, but maybe that's not your start and end. Maybe you want your fall to be September 1st to November 30th. Maybe you have a wedding or something, November 22nd. So you want your fall to start a little late. The actual dates don't matter as much as the fact that you choose them and decide them in advance. This is the beginning of this chapter and this is the end. Psychologists call this temporal landmarks. These are dates or events that stand out from the ordinary passage of time and divide our lives into distinct chapters. New Year's Day is an obvious one. Your birthday is another one. I am obsessed with the full moon and the new moon because I use them as temporal landmarks. One of the really cool things about temporal landmarks is they increase our self efficacy, our belief in our ability to figure things out and do what we say we will because we feel a little bit of distance from the past us who has gotten lost in the sauce. And when we believe in our ability to follow through, we are much more likely to follow through. This is called the fresh start effect in psychology. The way that starting a new chapter, even if it's arbitrary and chosen by us, increases our ability to do what we say we will. So map out what your fall will look like in terms of chronos chronological time. Block out when you will do what? Give your fall a start date and an end date. The second word the ancient Greeks had for time is kairos. If chronos is clock time, kairos is opportune time. It's the right moment. It's how time passes in ways that cannot be measured or planned for. We've spent this whole episode talking about chronos. What are you going to do? What are you not going to do? When are you going to do it all? How are you going to spend these next three months? And that's important because these are your inputs and we can control our inputs. But ultimately, we do not organize our lives and keep striving towards these new versions of ourselves because we want to become efficient at completing tasks. We do this because we're hoping to be there when something happens. Something that is at least some extent outside of our control. You cannot schedule falling in love. You cannot schedule the conversation in a friendship where you suddenly get really deep and get really close. You can't schedule your next great idea. You cannot schedule the professional opportunity that you don't even know exists yet. You cannot schedule a door opening that you didn't even know was there. You don't get to know an advance which completely ordinary Sunday afternoon with someone will become a moment in time that you would give anything to step back into. So if chronos and all this life planning is what we do with our time, kairos is what happens inside of time. It is our why. So as we set up all these systems, it's important to remember that the moment we let our systems be more important than the life inside of them, we've completely missed the point. So the last thing I want you to think about is the kairos of this season. What are the opportune moments that you cannot schedule that you want to hold space for? Maybe this is a creative breakthrough. Maybe it's falling in love. Maybe it's friendships that stop feeling like work and start feeling like ease. And you don't need to plan anything for these things. That's the point. We can control our inputs. We can control the chronos. We can choose what deserves our time and protect it. But then we have to loosen our grip on what any of it is supposed to produce, leave room for the life inside our life. Okay, lightning round recap. What have we talked about today? Today we talked about how to plan your fall to change your life. And I walked you through the five step planning system that I used to recalibrate after one season and plan for the next and the philosophy and psychology behind it. Step number one, the audit. We talked about Simone de Beauvoir's Facticity and Transcendence. The task here is to take a look at the goals that you set versus where you actually are what has happened this year. Step number two, the purge. The task here is to declutter your physical and digital spaces and redesign the choice architecture of your spaces to make the choices that you want to make easy. We talked about Barry Schwartz's paradox of choice, the idea that at some point, having more choices makes it harder to choose and makes us less happy with what we do choose. Number three, the choice. We wrote down five goals and then picked three. We talked about Daniel Conman's planning fallacy and how we have a tendency to drastically underestimate how long stuff takes us. Number four, the trade off. We talked about Friedrich Nietzsche and his love of brief habits and this idea that maybe it's okay to get a little consumed by something. Maybe it is okay to release our grip on this tyrannical impossible sense of balance. Decide what you are willing to let your goals cost you and what you are not. Step number five, we talked about the ancient Greeks conception of time, cronos and chyrros. We talked about planning our fall in terms of cronos, chronological time, blocking out our calendar, giving our season a start and end date. Temporal landmarks to trigger the fresh start of fact that increases our South Africa Sea. But ultimately, we're going to have to go back to the end of the year. And we're going to have to go back to the end date, temporal landmarks to trigger the fresh all of this is about kairos. The stuff we can't plan for. You made it all the way to the end of this episode. It takes a lot of courage to hope in the way that you clearly do. And a lot of guts and gumption to be open to a future season that looks really different than the current one. That's brave and really cool. And as you move towards this you that you see in your head, I hope you can take a pause right now and be with you that you are right now and recognize how amazing they are. And I think your fall is going to unfold beautifully. I think this is going to be a beautiful season for you. And when it is, know that that is in large part because this you right now, the you listening to this with not a single thing different is deciding to make it so. Thank you so much for listening. If you made it to this point in the episode, you gotta leave a comment. You have to tell me what one of your big three goals is if you're open to it, make it real, putting it out in the universe and hitting send. Tell me what's on your plate this fall. What does it look like for you? I want to know and I'm reading for you so deeply. I think you can do anything you say your mind to and I'm proud of you already. I love you. I'll see you Sunday after next.