Farmers have known this forever: you can't push the same field to produce year after year without rest. Eventually, you exhaust the soil. So you let it lie fallow—not abandoned, just resting. Time for the earth to restore what it gave.

I'm entering a fallow season.

Time for Doing, Time to Rest

The last months have been expansion. Building, launching, creating. 11 apps, book work, app updates, podcast episodes, game design, writing. The kind of season where energy feels abundant and possibility feels real.

But I've reached the seasonality of less.

It's not dramatic. No burnout, no crisis. Just the quiet recognition that I've shifted seasons without adjusting my rhythms. What worked in summer doesn't serve in winter. And winter—both literal and personal—has arrived.

In Norway, we have a word for this: mørketid. The dark time. Shorter days, longer nights, the natural pull inward. There's cultural permission here for less during mørketid. Less social obligation. Less productivity pressure. Less expectation of being "on."

The wisdom isn't to fight winter by pretending it's summer. The wisdom is to adjust.

Maintenance Mode

I'm not stopping. That's important to say. I'll still build, make, create. But some things are shifting into what I think of as maintenance mode—a concept I explore in Life as User Experience.

Maintenance isn't failure to grow. It's sustained attention, without the pressure of expansion. It's the craft of upkeep—vedlikehold, as Norwegians say. The ongoing care that keeps things working without demanding they also improve.

Some projects will get this kind of attention now:

  • A move towards regular updates, not major features
  • Tending, not transforming
  • Preservation of what works, not pursuit of what could be better

This isn't decline. It's seasonal adjustment.

What This Season Asks

Winter also asks for conscious endings. Not everything can hibernate—some things need to be released.

I've been thinking about feature deprecation: the practice of gracefully sunsetting what has completed its purpose. Not because it failed, but because it's done. The field goes fallow not by abandoning everything, but by choosing consciously what to tend, what to let rest, and what to release entirely.

Winter asks for consolidation, depth, saying no. Fewer things, tended with more attention. Smaller circles of focus. Earlier nights, quieter days, less reaching outward.

This doesn't mean doing nothing. It means doing differently.

Perhaps the hardest part is giving oneself permission to be seasonal. We're taught to be consistent—same performance year-round, same output regardless of circumstance or energy. But consistency across all seasons isn't human—isn't natural.

Winter will come whether I plan for it or not. The question is: will I adjust with it, or be dragged along in resistance?

I'm choosing adjustment.

What Stays, What Shifts

Things going into maintenance mode or fallow:

  • App development: maintained, not expanded
  • DigTek/blog writing and podcast: I'm not stopping, but shifting gears

Things staying active (but differently):

  • Back to the core: picking up the camera and the photowork—despite the dark
  • Other writing: I'm commited to The Circle
  • Game creation: when energy is there, not forced

The field doesn't produce during fallow time. But it's not wasted time—it's restoration time. The soil rebuilds what it gave. And when the next season of growth comes, it has something to give.

This season asks for less. Not as punishment, not as failure, but as appropriate response to winter—both outside and within.

The constraint isn't limitation—it's focus. And focus, as always, is where the real work happens.

Takk for nå, autumn. Winter is here.
Let the field rest.