A Moratorium On Months

Months confuse me. For starters, they aren’t all the same length. And they don’t start on the same day of the week. They come at us in chaotically unpredictable ways. Commit to doing something once a month and you’re locked into a pattern that changes every few weeks.

One of my favourite regular commitments is a memoir writers’ group. At first, we agreed to meet once a month. But I found the cadence hard to connect with. If you meet monthly, but choose the same day every month (in this case Monday morning for me), it creates an irregular rhythm. Sometimes, because I was across the International Date Line, I wound up having two meetings in the same month. It was introducing stress into what should be a liberating creative experience.

So I investigated the idea of monthly meetings. They weren’t popular. Okay, the people I know are mostly productivity geeks and creative souls. So it might be a self-selecting cohort. But I heard a steady stream of reasons to avoid monthly meetings. If something is pressing, then once a month isn’t enough. Twice a quarter can be just as good as monthly. Or ten times a year, spread out to avoid holiday seasons.

Monthly is just kind of a default. We inherited an odd calendar and got used to adapting to it. The cycles of the moon make sense to me. The Gregorian months, not so much.

So what if we just did away with months?

My big productivity gambit for 2026 is to pretend, as much as I can, that months don’t exist. I’m not committing to anything that relies on a monthly cadence. I’m counting days, weeks, and quarters or seasons. But not months.

Days make sense. The older I get the more I find myself wanting my days to be more or less the same as each other. The things I really want to do with my life – writing, making art and music, staying healthy, and supporting my family – are most likely to happen if I schedule them every day. The simple binary of workday and non-workday allows for the other important things that need a repeating rhythm, like rest, gardening, seeing films, visiting museums and galleries, or staying connected with friends.

Weeks also work. Okay, I don’t like the odd seven-day thing. I dream of weeks being different. I feel like 5 days of work and 3 days of rest suits me better than 5+2 or 4+3. But on some level we have to try and fit into society. The French tried to adopt a metric ten-day week after the Revolution. Let’s just say it didn’t end well.

And the on-off binary works with weeks as well. Working week. Holiday week. The holiday weeks allow for things that matter to me too. Travel, skiing, and the kind of rest you can’t get when your mind is drifting towards the work you need to do tomorrow.

How often those holiday weeks come in is shaped by the quarters or seasons. I’m using quarters to explain the idea of dividing the year into four. And a lot of people think in quarters because of work. But my mind drifts towards seasons. Nature sets a pattern for me. Summer and winter invite reflection and self-evaluation. Spring and autumn tend towards focused work and getting things done. I take them in interchangeable pairs so I can stay in the same mindset as I travel from the southern to the northern hemisphere.

How many weeks of holiday to take is a big topic. Too big to discuss here. But I believe every quarter needs its holiday. Every season needs its fallow week. When I recall the worst experiences of exhaustion and burnout, the phrase “more than three months without a rest” is lurking somewhere in the story. It was certainly the case for me in 2025.

Sometimes we forget that a lot of the systems we use to count and quantify the passing of time are just made up. Lately I’ve become curious about Christian liturgical calendars. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon feel like fruitful ideas to explore. Mid-morning is the transition from writing to the rest of my work. Mid-afternoon is the time to think about what needs to be finished and done by the end of the day.

The moment we start to feel the way our lives unfold through time, all sorts of possibilities open up for tuning our schedules specifically to our needs.

For 2026, I’m looking at week 20 or 24 instead of sometime in May or June. I’m trying to feel, in a more granular way, how tight or accommodating my schedule feels.

For the writers’ group I suggested we try a five-week cadence. That was close to monthly. But consistent. And since some of us were always feeling a little rushed to have our words ready, it let the rhythm breathe a little more. So far it’s working well.