What to do with your September energy

September energy can be really great. But it can also be shorter-lived than it feels, which makes it worth spending deliberately.

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Depending on how your summer went, you might be feeling that back-to-school buzz right now: new projects, blank notebooks, and what one late-90s romcom called bouquets of sharpened pencils.

I see it in my clients every year, and I feel it myself. The question of course is, what to spend that energy on.

Option one: do something new

This is the one I hear most from my clients. Let’s do something new! A podcast. A whole new offer. A complete website rebuild. The ideas tend to be big, because the energy is big.

There’s a tension in this for me. It’s my job as a small business mentor to encourage you and cheer you on and help you build the thing you want to build. It’s also my job to rein you in a bit.

So if you want to start something new this month, the question isn’t “can I do this?”—in September, the answer is always yes. The question is: how sustainable is this in two months, when the energy has gone? And then the follow-up, which is the uncomfortable question: what needs to stop so this can happen? Something has to give. Better to choose it now than to find out in November that your projects have become unsustainable.

Option two: go deeper on what you already have

This is a less obvious option, and perhaps less exciting. But it can be worth it too

Going deeper on something you already have might mean building on a product that’s already selling—using it as the starting point for a related product, or a small line of them, rather than inventing something from scratch.

Or look at your marketing and ask: what could I make work harder? That’s the question I asked myself when I redesigned my marketing after coming off social media. In my case the answer was my newsletter: I started sending it twice a month instead of once, and I got more intentional about where and how people could sign up, and how easy that was.

It can also be the less glamorous work. SEO. A batch of new blog posts, which are always worth writing because they show search engines your site is still current. New pins for URLs that are already doing well—Pinterest rewards that combination, existing performance plus fresh pins, and it’s much cheaper than making something new to pin.

The same caution applies here as to option one of course: September energy might be telling you that you have more time and capacity than you actually have, so be aware.

The one that’s probably most worth it: change how you work

The genuinely useful way to spend this energy, I think, isn’t tied to what you do at all—not the products or the offers or the marketing. It’s how you work, and how much time you spend working.

I was reminded of this by a comment someone left on a recent newsletter about planning. What she said, essentially, is that you can’t assess a routine from the inside. When you’re in it, it’s almost impossible to see. But even a two-week break gives you enough distance to notice what you’d like to be different. The most clear-headed plans, she said, get made in August.

Most of us know the feeling. You’re away, you’re lying on a beach or walking somewhere or reading a hundred pages of a novel in an afternoon, and you think: I want more of this. And then you go back to work and it evaporates.

I’m not suggesting you throw everything out. Long hikes and whole novels in a day aren’t realistic on a working Tuesday. I’m talking about gentle, intentional steps. Small things you noticed while you were off, woven into your everyday.

That might be looking at how your day starts: if your mornings are rushed, and especially if you have children, what happens after everyone’s out the door? Can you have ten minutes of calm before work begins?

It might be working more honestly with your energy. If you wake up sluggish, that’s probably not the day for the most cognitively demanding thing on your list. I’d move the writing and do some editing or planning instead. Yours might be different, but the idea holds: notice what you want, then make an intentional decision to add it.

→ More on this: my Friday weekly review, an anti-hustle approach to planning your weeks and days, and how to plan your week when standard time management doesn’t work.

Something to try

Whatever you noticed over the summer—about your work, your rhythm, the pace you’d like—write it down today.

Because as soon as the routines start up again, and they will, we fall straight back into them. Even the ones we were unhappy with. The window where you can still see your own patterns clearly is closing.

You don’t have to change everything at once. Small changes, small steps.

I’m curious: do you get the September feeling, or does it pass you by entirely? And if you get it, do you spend it on something new or on something you already have?

Leave a comment here and I’ll reply.

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