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A personal email newsletter ought to be divided into seasons, just like a TV show.

The benefits being:

• a sense of progress: of going and getting somewhere.
• an opportunity for breaks: to pause and reflect, reconfigure.
• an opportunity, furthermore, to make big changes: in terms of subject, structure, style.
• an opportunity to stop: gracefully.

I like this as a way of setting expectations for yourself and your audience. I think it also opens up an opportunity to be playful and experiment. Having a finish line rather than a vanishing point on the horizon is energizing.

I see podcasts that go both directions on this. Some podcasters start recording with no timeline parameters in mind. Others approach it with a definite set of episodes they want to do. I'd never thought about translating that to a newsletter.

Shared by Matt Webb.