Every January, executives hope to start the year with energy and focus. Yet too often, teams return from the year-end break exhausted rather than refreshed. Instead of feeling recharged, employees report tiredness, unfinished work and even tension at home from working during the holidays.
This is the paradox of holiday productivity: The last few weeks of December, when energy is at its lowest, are overloaded with deadlines, meetings, and last-minute obligations. Research shows that 41% of people experience high levels of stress during this period, which leads to inefficiency, continued work after hours and burnout.
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The paradox is not just about productivity; it also involves memory. Psychologists call this the peak-end effect: People evaluate an experience largely by how it ends.
If the year ends in chaos, employees remember the entire year as exhausting, no matter how balanced the previous months were. This distorted memory extends into January, sapping motivation and drive.
The annual closing week
Based on my work with executive teams, I’ve introduced a simple but powerful ritual to change this dynamic: annual close week.
Think of it like a Formula 1 pit stop. Cars don’t win by running without stopping; they win because pit stops keep them competitive.
Closing week is the organizational pit stop that prevents burnout, creates closure, and sets the stage for a fresh start.
The principle is simple: close pending issues, don’t open new ones. When you complete tasks, your brain can remove them from active attention, freeing up mental space. When you open new activities, you overload your memory and create stress.
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By closing things now and postponing new ones, you generate the mental space, sense of accomplishment and collective energy that make a truly meaningful year-end.
How to Start the Closing Week Ritual
Here is a practical step-by-step guide to implementing closing week in your organization, along with examples from clients of mine who have successfully started the ritual. (Names have been changed to preserve privacy.)
Set expectations. Set the stage for success. Start by explaining to your team why you’re introducing this new ritual: to reduce stress, protect energy, and start the new year refreshed. Then, establish these parameters during the team’s closing week:
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Prioritize finishing over starting. Give the team permission to identify what really needs to be finished and what can be delayed. Much of the frenetic activity in organizations is false urgency: busyness that doesn’t lead to meaningful progress.
Prohibit most gatherings. Anne, a client of mine, implemented a meeting ban, and her team freed up more than 40% of their time.
Encourage automatic out-of-office (out-of-office) responses. Here’s an example of what an automated response might sound like: “Thank you for your message. I’m prioritizing focused work right now as we approach the holiday break, and it may take me longer to respond to emails. I’ll be checking my inbox more regularly again on Monday, January 5.”
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Identify which tasks to prioritize during the week. The following four questions will help you and your team members identify where to focus attention. Ask yourselves:
1. What “two-way door” decisions have you been putting off?
Amazon popularized the concept of “two-way doors”: decisions that can be reversed if necessary. They are often postponed unnecessarily.
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Steve, a sales executive, had been putting off two such decisions: one about a team member who wasn’t meeting expectations and another about discontinuing a failing product. During the closing week, he finally had the peace of mind to act on both. The relief was immediate.
2. What unfinished tasks would give you the greatest sense of satisfaction when finally completed?
Here are two other customer examples to illustrate how much of a difference it makes to focus time and energy on something you wanted to cross off the list.
Mia, chief of staff, faced thousands of unanswered emails. Instead of trudging through them, she deleted everything older than three months (with AI screening for exceptions). The relief was immediate, and the gain of energy took her into the new year.
Julia, vice president of marketing, and her colleagues dealt with chaos in communication channels. Seven different messaging tools were used interchangeably.
She committed to narrowing them down to three, with clear guidelines for each. Closing week gave him the mental space he needed to prepare the proposal for the first leadership meeting in January.
3. What late conversation have you been putting off?
Many leaders procrastinate conversations they expect to be uncomfortable. Closing week is the time to face them.
Lillian, founder of a fast-growing consumer brand, faced a dilemma. Its director of purchasing and merchandising excelled at managing the demands of accelerated expansion, but seemed consumed by the pace of day-to-day life.
Strategic thinking about how the area should be organized for the coming years had been postponed. Lillian was hesitant to raise the topic — after all, the executive and his team were already overworked.
But recognizing that future growth depended on building organizational capacity now, she knew she needed to have the conversation.
The closing week finally gave him the time he needed to talk to his colleague, and it turned out to be a very constructive conversation that led to a new proactive approach to strategic growth.
4. What meetings, reports or activities could be eliminated or radically reduced in the new year?
One of the most energizing activities of closing week is offloading time-draining tasks to create space for new areas of focus or to intensify existing ones. Too often, routine meetings and reports automatically move into the new year without being questioned.
Patrick, a business unit leader, reviewed all the routine meetings scheduled for January with his assistant.
They identified which ones he could withdraw from, which ones he would participate in only on demand, and where frequency or duration could be reduced. The result: a 30% reduction in time spent in routine meetings.
Kevin, manager of a pharmaceutical production unit, had agreed with his executive team to adjust the agenda for a bi-weekly meeting — everyone felt there was too much time devoted to day-to-day issues and not enough to growing the business.
The closing week gave him time to reflect, and together with a key team member, he wrote a new agenda, adjusted the participant list, and set the length of meetings going forward.
Celebrate the ritual
To consolidate closing week as a strategic ritual, end with celebration. Bring the team together, share your top three closes from the week, and highlight a key learning. Then ask:
On a scale of 1 to 5, how are you heading into the holidays compared to last year?
(5 = significantly better, less stressed; 1 = more stressed.)
This simple reflection reinforces the value of the ritual and builds momentum for the year ahead.
Why closing matters more than starting
Most leadership advice on productivity focuses on how to start a new year. But beginnings are shaped by endings.
If you close the year differently, with intentional resolution and reflection, it allows the team to finish with a sense of accomplishment and start invigorated, not weighed down by pending issues.
Introducing a new ritual doesn’t just change the holiday experience; Research across different fields shows that rituals are vital in times of transition and can offer meaning, closure, and collective energy.
The annual closing week is one such ritual. It transforms the end-of-year productivity paradox into a moment of renewal.
By closing issues, tackling delayed decisions, offloading routine work, and celebrating achievements, leaders can ensure their teams enter January not exhausted, but energized.
Frans van Loef is an executive coach based in Amsterdam and a specialist in human capacity management in organizations.
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