Work Year Wrapped
Leverage the calm of the holiday pause
There is a magical moment on your work calendar that you probably didn’t even notice. Most employers give Christmas Day as a holiday. And if you’re lucky, you also get Christmas Eve off. But the less recognized spot on your calendar are the two workdays before Christmas Eve. These are your “Reflect & Refine” days.
It’s pretty common for people to take the entire period between Christmas and New Year’s off. It’s also common for people to add more days onto their vacation on either end of those holidays. This creates a window where the office is a ghost town, in the best kind of way. Rather than following everyone else out of the office doors at the end of the year, try sticking around for these two days when no one else is there.
Reflect & Refine is a two-day period where there are no distractions, interruptions, or surprises. You don’t even have to operate your Triage Shield1, because there is no incoming mail, no incoming chats, and no meetings. There is just you.
And being the last work days of the year, it’s the perfect time to execute the higher level version of your Weekly Review2. Here is the process I’ve followed for the last two decades to close out my current year strong, feel more prepared for the year ahead, and more fully enjoy the holiday break from work.
Day 1
1.1) Step back
Come into the office, but don’t turn on your computer. If you have any other chair in your office besides your desk chair, have a seat in that. If the only chair you have is your desk chair, then first roll it away from your desk to the other side of the room, and then sit there. Set a timer for 10 minutes3, and then start getting yourself in the right mindset for what’s ahead. Tell yourself, “Today isn’t a typical workday. Today I don’t care about the email, and the high priority issues on my plate. I’m not here to get any work done. Instead, I want to think about how work overall is going.“
When the timer goes off, get up and take a couple of minutes to do a slow walk of your office hallways. When you return to your office, turn your computer on. If there are distractions on the screen, close them all down. Bring up your External Brain4 and create a “2025 Reflect” page. Alternatively, if you have the whiteboard space and prefer to brainstorm with markers and boards, then do that.
Over the course of the day, you will be referring to both your External Brain and Your Team’s External Brain5 to help remind you of the year gone by. The trick is to make sure that you don’t get sucked into present day problems as you do it. For instance, when you remember a relevant conversation that happened in email, you’re going to open your email. At that moment, you may easily fall into the habit of commencing email triage. Fight it. This is where I will commonly remind myself before even opening my mail, “I’m only opening mail to find this conversation. I don’t care about any other mail. I’m opening mail, going straight to the search back, and typing to find the conversation I want. Then I’m closing the app.”
