Why the last six weeks of the year are always your best ones

Every year, in roughly the same six weeks, something strange happens inside most sales organizations. Activity spikes. People who spent October putting off difficult conversations suddenly have them. Management starts checking in more. In the insurance and financial services industries, the fourth quarter can account for thirty to forty percent of annual sales, and people behave, as Brian Moran and Michael Lennington put it, differently in November and December than they do in July and August.

The reason isn't magic. It's a deadline. December thirty first is an arbitrary date, nothing about it is inherently significant, yet everyone treats it as the line in the sand where success or failure gets decided. Moran and Lennington noticed that this same urgency almost never shows up earlier in the year, because in January, December still looks a long way off. People fall behind in February and think, I've got eleven more months. They fall behind again in June and think the same thing. A twelve month horizon, they argue, is just far enough away to make procrastination feel safe.

Their solution borrows from an unlikely source: athletic training. Starting in the 1970s, Eastern European Olympic coaches developed a technique called periodization, concentrating an athlete's training on one skill at a time for a focused block, usually four to six weeks, before moving to the next. Instead of vaguely training everything, an athlete gets exceptionally good at one thing at a time.

Moran and Lennington adapted the idea for work and life by redefining what a year even is. Forget twelve months. A year, in their system, is now twelve weeks. There's no slow quarter with plenty of time left, because the whole year ends in twelve weeks. Every week is either progress toward that ending or a bad week you can't really afford, and there's another fresh year waiting right after this one, win or lose.

The effect, they've found with clients, is that the focus, energy and honest reckoning that used to happen for six weeks a year now happens twelve times as often.

Begin by picking a twelve week block starting today and treat its last day the way you'd treat December thirty first: as a real deadline that decides whether this stretch was a success. Borrow the discipline athletes use and narrow your focus to one or two priorities for this block rather than trying to improve everything at once. Write down, specifically enough that you'll know without arguing with yourself, what a genuinely great twelve weeks would look like. And decide now, before you're tired or behind, how you'll mark the end of it, so the reflection and reset that usually only happens once a year in December can happen four times as often.