In the UK, things are winding down for Christmas. If you're in retail or hospitality, t'is the season to be jolly. But for business owners in other sectors, it can be extremely stressful.
How many times in November did you hear: "Let's do it in the New Year."
The impact of Christmas being advertised early clearly helps retail, but has an invisible, damaging impact on a lot of other businesses who can't get hold of customers because they're eating mince pies.
Is this a Scrooge rant? Yes.
And it's about timing. You need to identify the windows in the year to run your best sales, marketing and productivity sprints, rather than absorbing invisible lulls and wondering why nothing's working.
Here is UK productivity mapped out from the lens of time worked.
The Basic Subtraction
Start with 365 days. Remove weekends and 2025 has 261 weekdays.
Remove 8 bank holidays: 253 days.
Average sick days (6): 247 days.
Annual leave (20 days): 227 days.
230 productive days. Not bad, you think. But wait...
The Parent Tax
If you've got school-age kids, your calendar is like Swiss cheese.
The daily bracket problem: drop-off at 8:30, pick-up at 3:15. That gives you roughly 9am to 2:30pm for uninterrupted work unless you use breakfast and after-school clubs and split the duties, if you can.
Other calendar bombs include. INSET days (5 per year, often no warning). Sick children who need collecting (5-10 days if you're lucky). Sports days, plays, assemblies, parents' evenings. The forgotten PE or medical kit emergency run.
Conservative estimate: 12-18 days lost.
That takes us to 211 days.
The Holiday Drag
UK school holidays add up to 13 weeks. A quarter of the year.
October half term. Christmas (2 weeks). February half term. Easter (2 weeks). May half term. Summer (6 weeks).
If you have kids, you're running at 50% capacity during these periods even with holiday clubs and grandparents.
If you're trying to reach decision-makers, it's worse. Half terms are ghost towns. August is a write-off.
Just look at the traffic drop on the roads. Call it 25 days at half-capacity plus 10 complete write-offs.
We are now down to 176 days - less than half the year.
The Christmas Drift
This now starts in mid-November. That's five-six weeks before the big day.
"Let's push that to January" appears in emails around week two of November. Christmas parties, lunches and drinks are also now in November, leaving December for casual pub drinking (my favourite), indiscriminate skiving (also my favourite) and catch-ups.
From December 15th, you can forget it. You might as well join in.
If you're an American, you're astounded at how no work gets done but everyone is still 'working'.
That's 6 weeks of degraded output. Realistically 7-8 working days lost on top of everything else. And I'm being kind.
We're now at 168 days.
But wait, there's more.
The Friday Disappearance
The post-COVID reality is Fridays don't count as they once did.
"I don't take meetings on Fridays" is now socially acceptable. Work-from-home Friday often means life-admin Friday or 2pm-finish Friday. Emails sent on Friday might as well be sent Monday.
The 4-day week is officially adopted by some companies and unofficially practised by many more.
Even if you're working, reaching others on Fridays is 50% effective at best. That's another 16 days effectively compromised.
152 days.
The Human Battery
Two more drains nobody talks about, but to be fair these are universal - not just UK specific.
The Monday brain takes until 10-11am to actually engage. Catching up on emails, remembering what you were doing Friday.
The lunch crash if you eat carbs. Hits between 1pm and 2:30pm. The meal deal coma. The Pret crash. Blood sugar chaos.
Together these cost another 25 days of equivalent productivity - although you could argue not everyone is like this and I might be a drama queen.
Final count: 127 productive days.
That's 35% of the calendar year.
The C-Suite Reality
For senior buyers and decision-makers, it's worse.
They take 30+ days holiday, not 20. They do more travel - although they might work. There are EA gatekeepers filtering everything and their "available" windows are 15-minute slots between other commitments.
For a senior buyer, you're looking at 60-80 days where they're genuinely reachable and in decision-mode.
That's roughly 20% of the calendar year.
What This Means
- You need to build a greater sense of timing in your company.
- Deals can take a year or more to get over the line because of this.
- Every internal delay in your company costs you more than you think. "Let's just do it next week or next year can get very expensive", especially if you're a startup with a burn rate to consider.
- If you're in B2B sales or advisory work, you're not selling into 365 days. You're selling into maybe 60-80 days of genuine availability per decision-maker, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be communicating and engaging.
- If you're an engineering company, trying to get local government to move, timing is everything. Your campaigns need to be bold, multi-stakeholdered and loaded with carrots and sticks - just to keep momentum.
- So pick your days and manage your timing carefully.
- Your nurturing needs to be well thought out and not left to last minute chance.
Your challenges this week:
- Count your own productive days honestly. Get your teams to do something similar about their customers and talk about it.
- Book your meetings now. People are happy to book next year rather than do now.
- Build a productivity calendar that shows when your and your customers' sprint windows will be. It'll help to engineer the right conversations on their agenda.