2016 is 40 Days Away

According to the calendar, we have nearly 100 days between now and Auld Lang Syne, but those of us who manage time in the real world know that “official” number is grossly inflated. When it comes to the workplace, the new year is just 40 days away, and more than half of those days come in October.

Effective time management begins with recognition of our annual patterns, from accounting season for accountants to Christmas shopping for almost everyone, the Labor Day denial and the Valentine’s Day scramble. Often, when we wonder why we’re still looking at the same (laminated??) to-do list we put together five years ago, the answer is, truly, in our stars. Or, more accurately, our one star, good old Sol.

The remainder of 2015 year is a good example of our ability to overestimate the time available for us. While people show up at work between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, too much productive time is burned up thinking about holidays and family and online shopping and fantasy leagues and maybe getting in some vacation time. Planning for the coming year? We’ll get to that in January.

Except, of course, we don’t “get to that in January.” And we don’t because, in January, we’re too busy complaining about winter and checking our fantasy league standings and closing out last year’s books. February is better, even if it’s the shortest month, but by March we’re thinking about spring break with the kids and getting our personal taxes filed and, dagnabbit, when is spring finally going to get here?

That’s why our productive year is so much shorter than our solar year, with October, February and May vying for Miss Productivity. The rest of the months barely enter the competition. (For accounting firms, the year is much, much shorter, but that’s a topic for another post.)

In the normal order of the seasons, even without any hurricanes or airline strikes or government shutdowns, the fates despise productivity. We don’t want to take on major projects during the summer because, well, it’s summer, and we don’t want to give up on summer until after Labor Day or, maybe, the equinox.

And then we get to today. Fall has fallen and we can finally focus on all those projects we were going to get to when we weren’t busy, or understaffed, or (fill in the blanks.) Looking ahead, it seems like we have three months to work with, but that is absolutely not the case. By November 15, most of the staff will be looking ahead to Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. They’ll be showing up for work, and they will be producing, but they will already be AWOL as far as productive planning, or new initiatives, or aggressive selling is concerned.

Yes, of course, your business is the exception. That’s not how your people work. That strategic plan will be implemented—or at least finalized—and nobody is going home until the work is done.  This post is about somebody else, everybody else, but not your people and not you.

Yep.

Forty days. Starting now. How quickly can you shift into sixth gear?