What to Stop Doing in December

Fifteen working days

December looks like a month and behaves like three weeks.

Take out the holidays, the days before them when nobody is reachable, and the days after when nobody is back, and the useful working period is around fifteen days for most businesses.

Meanwhile the workload is higher than usual, not lower, for anybody with a seasonal element.

So the arithmetic does not work, and the choice is between deciding what will not happen and discovering it in the last week.

What to stop

• Development and site changes, after the first week.
• New initiatives of any kind.
• Anything requiring somebody else's attention, since they are also busy.
• Reporting nobody reads.
• Long-term projects with no December deadline.
• Optimisation of things that are working adequately.

The third is the one people forget. Suppliers, accountants, printers, and contractors are all in the same fifteen days, so anything depending on them will slip regardless of your intentions.

What to protect

The short list that should have first call on every hour.

Selling: the enquiries, the quotes, the orders, and anything that turns interest into money this month.

Delivering: fulfilling what has already been bought, on time.

Answering: replying to customers, particularly anybody with a problem.

Everything else is negotiable, and treating those three as fixed makes the rest of the decisions straightforward.

Where something new competes with one of those three, the answer is already known.

The things that look urgent

Worth naming because they consume December every year.

The website change somebody suggested in November, which will feel urgent and can wait until January.

The new supplier, the new system, the new process, all of which need attention you do not have and will be implemented badly.

The end-of-year review, which is genuinely useful and is better done in the quiet fortnight after the holidays than in the busy one before.

And the marketing plan for next year, which needs clear thinking and will not get it this month.

Each of those is a January task presenting itself as a December one.

A worked example

A business began December with a list of eleven things, including a new booking system, a website refresh, and a supplier review.

By the second week the seasonal workload had absorbed everything, and the eleven items were still there, generating a background sense of failure.

The following year they wrote two lists at the end of November: five things that would happen and six that explicitly would not, with the second list dated for January.

The work that got done was roughly the same.

The difference was that nothing felt like a failure, nobody was chasing items that were never going to move, and the January list was ready to start on the fourth.

The owner described writing the not-doing list as the most useful half hour of the quarter.

Defer it out loud

The step that makes deferral work rather than being avoidance.

Tell whoever is waiting: the supplier, the colleague, the person who suggested it, with a date in January.

Put it on a January list, with enough detail that it can be picked up cold.

Silent deferral produces chasing, uncertainty, and a suspicion that things get dropped, which costs more than the delay itself.

An explicit we are not doing this until the eleventh of January is accepted almost universally, and it stops the item consuming attention every few days.

Freeze the systems

A specific application of the same principle.

No website changes, no plugin updates, no new tools, and no process changes from the first or second week onward.

The cost of something breaking in the middle of December is disproportionate, and the person who could fix it is frequently away.

Where a change genuinely cannot wait, make it early in a working day, test the whole customer path afterwards, and have a way to reverse it.

This is the easiest item on the list to agree and the one most often broken by somebody making one small improvement.

Keep one thing going

An exception worth making deliberately.

The habits that compound, such as photographing work, asking for reviews, and collecting contact details, are worth continuing precisely because December generates so much material.

More customers, more finished work, and more goodwill than any other month, and stopping the collection during the richest period is a false economy.

None of those takes more than a minute at a time, which is why they survive a busy month if somebody decides they will.

Choose the one that matters most for your business and protect it alongside the three essentials.

Tell customers what is happening

The external half of stopping, and it prevents most of the friction that deferral causes.

Publish your closing dates, your last dispatch date, and when somebody will be answering, in the places people look: the site, the listing, and any automatic reply.

Where response times will be longer, say what they will be rather than leaving people to discover it.

Somebody who knows you close on the twenty-third and reply from the fourth plans around it. Somebody who does not know assumes they are being ignored.

Do it a fortnight ahead rather than on the day, since the people it matters most to are the ones deciding this week whether to place an order with you.

The counter-case

Not every business has a busy December, and for many trades and business-to-business suppliers it is the quietest month of the year.

For those, the advice inverts completely: December is when to do the site work, the review, the planning, and the tidying up that never gets done, because customers are unavailable anyway.

There is also a risk in freezing too early. A business that stops all improvement from the first of the month loses three usable weeks it could have spent well.

And some things genuinely have to happen in December: year-end accounting, statutory deadlines, and anything contractual.

Work out which December you have before deciding what to stop, because the two versions need opposite plans.

The half hour

1. Count your actual working days.
2. Write the five things that will happen.
3. Write the six that will not, dated for January.
4. Tell anybody waiting on the second list.
5. Freeze systems from a stated date.
6. Protect selling, delivering, and answering.
7. Keep one compounding habit going.

Step three is the one that changes how the month feels, and it is the list nobody writes.

Setting priorities without heavy process is covered in planning next year without a spreadsheet.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.