The Best 50 Business Days of the Year

ALL SYSTEMS GO

When planning out our year, we like to think of the work that we'll do not as a constant push, but as a flow, or rhythm that pulses up and down through the seasons. Not only is it not productive for teams to operate at their absolute peak for 52 weeks of the year, it's not possible.

There are certain times where, no matter how hard you push, you're just not going to get that person on the phone or get your community to care about the thing you're working on. For most of us, we're coming off of one of those periods. Depending on your industry, July-August can be a terrible time to get anything significant done. Vendors are difficult to reach, people around you are constantly out of office, and if they're not at the lake physically, they're halfway there mentally.

We've learned to embrace that period and to flow right along with it. We shortened some of our days, took extra-long weekends, and passed on projects that weren't in our wheelhouse.

But it's now September, and a lot of kids are back in school, many of us are even back in our offices, and it's Go Time.

For Junction, that particularly intense period runs from roughly the start of September to the second week in December. When I look back over the years, nearly all of the significant progress and projects that had the greatest impact on ourselves and our clients happened in this 50-working-day period, before the inevitable down-shift for the holiday season. There's something exciting about the fact that we've changed up our batteries and are ready to run a full speed for the next (roughly) 50 days.

So what?

I share this idea of annual flow because we're all going to start seeing the impact of this all-systems-go time of year. Your business may or may not share our idea of annual flow, but the fact is the platforms are going to start releasing new features, customer behaviours are going to shift and our competitors are going to be operating at full speed.

All of that doesn't even mention the largest force that's currently underway, which is the Great Return. To be clear: the threat of COVID-19 is far from over, but as the numbers from this Summer are starting to roll in, many businesses have put the pandemic-slump in their rear-view mirrors.

Whatever projects you had on hold, now is the time to fire them up. The combination of the season, the return to work, and the return to life outside of our homes is going to create a powerful force over the next 100 days that, for many of us, will be the most transformative period of the past few years.

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting