Slow down to speed up (end-of-year edition)

Most leaders enter December with a subconscious belief: “I need to finish everything.”

We compress deadlines, expectations, and unresolved tasks into a narrow window that makes it all feel more urgent than it is.

And as a result, we crawl into the holidays exhausted.

I’ve had years where I almost collapsed into the Christmas break.

I pushed hard to “get it all done” before the artificial year-end deadline. 

Then, during my time off, I got busy with family commitments, travel, and holiday parties. 

So I entered January tired and unfocused. 

I intended to reflect on the past year and strategise the upcoming one, but this reflection rarely happened wholeheartedly. 

I had to play catch-up in the first week of January, and the year unfolded in a similar vein.

But since then, my wife instilled a belief in me that shifted how I approach December:

How you enter the new year sets an important precedent for the year ahead.

If you tend to turn the final month into a sprint, I have a new approach for you to try.

But there’s an important question we must explore first:

Are you actually doing your best work when you hurry toward the finish line?

Underpinning the desire to “finish everything” is a convincing illusion: 

Speed equals progress.

I’ve seen this pattern in many leaders I’ve worked with, myself included.

Rushing creates the feeling of progress, but mistakes outputs for outcomes.

It feels like you’re gaining control, but you’re actually losing perspective.

Here’s the cognitive science behind this tendency. 

The desire to resolve every task sends your nervous system into heightened stress.

In that low-grade survival state, clarity collapses, and reactivity takes over.

Going faster feels like it will reduce stress, because the task list will shrink faster. 

But that pursuit of short-term relief has downstream consequences:

- Priorities are unclear because everything feels urgent.

- Decisions are driven by urgency instead of strategy.

- Reactivity sends you in the wrong direction, leading to costly pivots.

You get things done, yes. But rarely the right things, or in the right way.

We joke that anything unresolved in December is “next year’s problem.”

But rushing through this month often backfires.

You return in January to more problems because of decisions made while stressed and rushing.

Mistaking movement for progress creates more work for your future self. The stress you thought you outran is there to meet you in the new year, amplified.

After 15+ years helping leaders consistently perform at a high level without burning out, I no longer allow myself to rush to the end of Q4.

I realised the December exhaustion cycle bleeds into:

- Holiday time with loved ones.

- My ability to reflect and re-energise.

- And my momentum in Q1 of the new year.

So I changed my approach.

I moved my “finish line” one week earlier than my holiday break begins.

This year, that cut-off week is December 15–19. 

My principle for this week is simple:

Absolutely no new work.

I’ll push anything unfinished to January. 

I’m still working, but the nature of the work shifts to:

- Cleaning up and organising my life.

- Reflecting on the past year.

- Strategising for the year ahead.

- Energetically “closing off” with a mini ritual

Here’s what I’ve noticed after years of doing this:

1. I’m more efficient with wrapping things up in the weeks before. (Parkinson’s Law is real.)

2. I can slow down, get my head above the noise, and see things with more clarity.

3. I close out the year with the wholehearted reflection I want.

4. I have space to create a strategic plan for the following year.

5. I enter my 2-week winter break not just structurally off but energetically off. 

This approach helps me enter the new year the way I want it to play out: with calm, presence, and intention.

And it aligns with the truth I’ve observed in business and life: 

Going slow when it matters is how you build more momentum later.

One of the most counterintuitive lessons I learned during my years at McKinsey was this:

The moments of greatest impact are rarely a result of speed.

When a project grew stressful, the instinct among many high performers was to push harder.

Work longer hours. Compress the timeline. Put more pressure on yourself and your team.

But that was usually the point when performance plateaued.

The leaders who consistently delivered the strongest outcomes responded differently.

They didn’t let urgency pull them into a reactive state.

Instead, they’d pause, lift their head, and look at the system.

They asked important questions again and again:

“What are we not seeing?”

“What is the actual bottleneck?”

“What would make everything else easier?”

Because of that shift, their leverage multiplied.

Those conversations often led to insights that made entire workflows unnecessary or revealed that we were solving the wrong problem altogether.

A moment of clarity could save weeks of effort.

Seeing this play out enough times confirmed for me that real value comes from heightened awareness and perspective, not constant movement.

December creates a perfect environment to practice that principle.

Leaders who burn out the fastest all share one assumption: If I do more, I’ll stay ahead.

But this year, it’s more important than ever to shift your view of productivity.

Because doing more is now an outdated metric for assessing your performance.

In fact, it’s more of a liability than an advantage. 

AI has changed the game in a way most people haven’t fully internalised.

It moves faster than we do. It does more. And it can produce output at scale. 

That means your competitive advantage no longer lives in speed or volume.

By relying on those, you’ll burn through your resources unnecessarily. 

Rely on AI and new technology for those, and focus on your unique skills.

Here’s where your edge lives now:

- Asking better questions.

- Creating space for insight.

- Discerning signal from noise.

- Making higher-quality decisions.

- Elevating perspective above the activity itself.

Today’s leaders win by thinking clearly, not by rushing.

Now that output is cheap and abundant, clarity is the most precious resource.

And clarity requires you to slow down long enough to understand the dynamics at play, your own inner state, and every element that ties into the bigger decision. 

When you prioritise clarity, you become more effective.

Your meetings run differently.

Your team stops spinning.

Your decisions are more intentional.

You regain leverage.

So work to update this belief before the new year.

If you notice yourself prioritising speed, remember that’s just your nervous system sounding a false alarm. Technology can add speed to your processes now.

Preserve your time and energy for clarity. That’s what will set you apart in 2026.

December is naturally reflective if you allow it to be.

It has several characteristics you won’t find any other time of year.

The collective pace shifts. 

We can look back on the year that’s passed to find lessons and opportunities.

We can listen for internal nudges telling us how we want the next year to go.

Just look at what happens in nature in the winter.

Animals preserve energy through hibernation.

Trees shed their leaves to make space for new growth.

The cold (in the Northern Hemisphere) has a purifying effect, contributing to soil health and pest reduction.

We can apply this seasonal lens to our lives, too. Tidying up our lives, setting a foundation for the new year, and saving energy for the work that truly matters. 

December offers 3 strategic opportunities:

1. Completion: Tie off the genuinely important work, not everything you could do.

2. Integration: Absorb the year’s lessons instead of skipping past them.

3. Recalibration: Tune your inner system before January loads you with new expectations.

When you race through December, you miss these important experiences.

When you slow down now, you enter January with energy, clarity and momentum that will compound throughout the year.

Slowing down isn’t about taking a day off or withdrawing from your responsibilities.

It’s about reframing how you carry those responsibilities.

Shifting your inner state so you make space, and can operate with intentionality (rather than reactivity).

Here’s how this can look in practice:

- Saying no to end-of-year busywork that just creates the illusion of progress.

- Asking: “If I only completed 3 things this month, which ones would move the needle?”

- Dedicating the last working week to integration, reflection, and planning, with no new work (or if that’s not possible, then at least the last 1-2 days).

- Letting your mind settle enough to see bigger patterns.

- Protecting pockets of uninterrupted thinking time, even if they’re small.

Slowing down may be a series of subtle decisions and reframes. But this process is important. It sets the stage for you to truly rest, replenish resources, and start your year the way you want.

Most leaders end the year as overwhelmed operators. The task list feels infinite, so they react to whatever is right in front of them without giving anything enough focus.

This doesn’t just apply to leaders of people, but anyone who is navigating complexity and responsible for setting their own direction.

It’s an exhausting place to lead from, and it traps you in the same patterns year after year.

The ones who outperform 2025 will be the ones who shift into “architect mode.”

That means stepping back far enough to see the system, not just the tasks inside of it.

This requires a slower pace and a calmer state of mind.

When you slow down, even for a few minutes at a time, you give yourself a chance to:

- Notice structural problems.

- Identify leverage points.

- Design smarter systems.

- Stop firefighting and start shaping the future.

There’s a quote that says, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

Slowing down now is how you speed up later.

You must not only understand this but implement it now, to perform at your best in 2026.

For the next 2 weeks, treat slowness as a strategic priority.

Lift your head above the noise. 

Look at your life and business from 30,000 feet.

Ask the questions that only you can ask.

What emerges when you stop rushing and start seeing?

Notice what becomes clear when you’re no longer sprinting toward an artificial deadline.