3 ways to re-think time
On the 14th day of every month, Spotify gives me 15 new hours of audiobook listening. Today is the 27th of November, and I already hit my limit. It’ll be another 17 days until I can get stuck into the next chapter of my book.
An enforced break. And a new chapter to look forward to on the other side.
Just like those of us in Australia are about to get a few weeks’ break, with many offices and business closed until mid-January.
Personally, and from a business perspective, I love this time of year. I was wondering why, so I looked into the psychology of time.
Although the calendar we use and the dates we count are completely made up, they are super useful for us humans to navigate our lives.
We like our lives to be divided into chapters. We need endings and beginnings. And breaks.
Here’s what Dan Pink wrote about in his book, ‘When’:
Beginnings
Fresh starts are powerful, but they don’t happen automatically. You need to create a psychological boundary. The holidays will do part of this, but you can also create a deliberate reset moment in early 2026.
If your team all drift back at different times, it’s even more important to create a moment to mark a new start.
In one kick off conference, we created a book of the best bits of the previous year, celebrated and laughed and learned from them. And then we physically closed that book on stage and opened a planning session for the new year.
Middles
An old colleague of mine gave me some good advice: “once you get senior, your boss doesn’t notice your day-to-day work, so you need to do three big things a year that really stand out”.
I call these your ‘tentpoles’. They make the year meaningful.
So…decide what these are. Be brave. And put them in your calendar with specific dates. You’ve committed to create some peaks for your year.
And if you know about the peak-end rule, you’ll know these tentpoles will make for a more memorable year.
Ends
Pink’s research indicates that endings need to be marked properly. Specifically, people need to work out what it was all for? What did it mean?
In an end-of-year team session next week, we’ll be running an exercise called ‘high points, low points and turning points’ and I’ll be inviting the team to work out what 2025 was all about for them. I first did this in the covid years and found it to be a powerful way to end a year, even a challenging year.
The other way to treat ends is to work backwards and plan-with-end-in-mind. In an offsite last week, we worked with a leadership team to answer the following question: -
Imagine it’s December 2026, and the team has had a great year. You’re looking back on the year.
What did you achieve?
What did you learn?
And what did it all mean?
The team last week used this exercise to build trust, alignment and a clear vision for what a successful year will look like. Powerful.
Getting time on your side
Using these ideas based on the psychology of time, you can make sure your 2026 journey has a strong beginning, memorable peaks, and a meaningful end.
Accelerate Out the Gate
If you want to start the year properly, we’re designing something new. Instead of a one-day kick-off session for teams, we’ve designed a 6-week Acceleration plan.
Week 1 features a half day offsite to connect the team and set the direction. What are the 2-3 biggest priorities you need to get some momentum on in the next 6 weeks?
In week 3, we reconnect for some team coaching: how are you tracking, what barriers have you hit, how will you overcome them?
In week 6, we run a retrospective: what have we achieved, what have we learnt, what can we do next to make most progress?
Get in touch if you want to Accelerate out of the Gates in Jan or Feb.
