It happens every Autumn …
It’s that time of year again. As the clocks go back and November arrives, every leader is faced with the same challenge: how do you maintain momentum and hit year-end targets without driving yourself and your team into the ground?
For most, the instinct is to double down. The default thinking suggests that the only way to finish strongly is through relentless acceleration – more meetings, more decisions, more sheer volume of activity. It’s a compelling, high-pressure approach that feels productive in the short term, but consistently leads to the same outcome: burnout, rushed decision-making, and a sluggish, depleted start to the new year.
Here at Brighter Thinking Limited, we advocate for a fundamentally different, and significantly more effective, approach: The ‘Wintering’ Mindset.
The Productivity Trap: Understanding Decision Fatigue
The core problem leaders face as the year draws to a close is not a lack of effort, but the rapid depletion of their most valuable resource: cognitive energy.
Every single choice you make – from approving a major strategic pivot to determining the appropriate tone for a critical email – draws from the same finite reservoir of willpower and mental processing power. Psychologists call the result decision fatigue. By Friday afternoon, or even mid-week, your brain’s capacity for truly complex, nuanced, and insightful thought is severely depleted.
You might mistake your urge for speed as efficiency, but often, it is merely the psychological desire to discharge the burdensome weight of responsibility quickly. This leads to leaders making reactive, low-quality choices that drain their personal energy and introduce noise and confusion into the organisation. You can make the wrong choices simply because saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ quickly seems easier than careful deliberation.
The ‘Wintering’ Mindset: Strategic Preservation
Our ‘Wintering’ Mindset takes its cue from the natural world. Winter is not a period of failure; it is a vital, strategic pause. Nature pulls its energy inwards, protecting core resources and slowing visible growth to prepare for an explosive, successful spring.
For a modern leader, ‘wintering’ is a conscious, intentional cognitive slowdown. It is designed not to halt progress, but to preserve and restore mental capacity when it is most tempting to waste it. It means consciously dialling back on the non-essential, the mundane, and the energy-consuming. Reserve your peak mental hours for what truly matters: deep strategic thought, reflection, and clear vision-setting.
This isn’t about procrastination; it’s about a structured, disciplined practice of resource allocation. It’s recognising that high-quality thinking is a marathon, not a sprint, and that sometimes the most efficient path forward is to temporarily stop running to recalibrate your compass. Use the cooling tempo of the year-end to your advantage, creating space for the kind of thinking that an over-scheduled, stressed mind simply cannot produce.
Three Steps to Initiate Your Strategic Slowdown
1. The Thought Triage: Be rigorous in identifying the decisions and activities that can be delegated, automated, or genuinely deferred until the new year. Ask yourself: Does this task require my unique intellectual contribution right now, or is it merely demanding my attention? Stop treating every request for your time as an urgent fire drill. The goal is to dramatically reduce the volume of minor mental transactions.
2. Guard Your Peak Hours: Actively block out “Deep Focus” sessions in your calendar. These are not for administration; they are for sustained, single-task concentration on complex problems or long-term planning. Treat these blocks like sacred, immovable meetings with your own future success. This immediately shifts your weekly structure from a reactive response model to a proactive creation model.
3. The Power of Reflection: Shift the focus from generating endless operational reports to engaging in reflective analysis. Schedule time to review what has genuinely worked this year, what hasn’t, and – critically – why. This practice generates the powerful, high-leverage insights needed to execute clearly in the new year, rather than just mechanically repeating past actions.
Your Actionable Tip:
Introducing the Decision-Free Friday Afternoon
To make this strategic slowdown immediately practical and to shield your entire team from decision fatigue, I highly recommend implementing the “Decision-Free Friday Afternoon” rule.
The Rule: From 1:00 p.m. onwards every Friday, the entire team is mandated to cease all non-urgent decision-making, stop all internal meetings, and avoid sending or expecting replies to complex emails or requests.
The Rationale: By Friday afternoon, cognitive reserves are demonstrably at their lowest ebb, leading to fatigued and often suboptimal choices. This rule provides an organisational structure to respect that biological reality, creating a collective permission structure to slow down.
The Benefit: This protected afternoon block immediately becomes a zone for true, high-value work:
• Deep Focus: Team members can finally tackle tasks requiring sustained, uninterrupted concentration, capitalising on the quiet office atmosphere.
• Creative Boost: Leaders use this time for ‘mind wandering’ – the low-energy, unstructured thinking that generates innovation and creative problem-solving. This is where the foundation for next year’s breakthrough ideas is laid.
• Genuine Recharge: Knowing they don’t have to face a demanding schedule or complex choices right before the weekend allows leaders and teams to genuinely switch off. This combats exhaustion and ensures they start Monday refreshed, not already depleted.
Implementing this simple rule shows your team that you value deliberate effectiveness over mere busyness. It’s a statement that says: “We will make fewer, better decisions.”
Accelerated Start, Clearer Future
By strategically ‘wintering’ now, you are building a powerful competitive advantage. The mental energy and clarity you preserve in November and December are not lost; they are banked. They convert directly into superior, high-impact strategic decisions, crystal-clear goal-setting, and an unparalleled burst of momentum when the new cycle begins.
You won’t simply be dragging yourself into the new year; you’ll be launching it – clear-headed, energised, and ready to execute the refined vision you deliberately honed during your strategic slowdown.
So, don’t wait for January to feel better; start creating space for brilliance today. Explore how to embed the ‘Wintering’ Mindset into your leadership practice.