F2F #66: Snooze till next year

As we inch towards mid-December, you know the drill: the pile of "maybe next year" tasks starts looking a lot more tempting. In fact, I always declare "snooze till next year" season when I receive the first email from someone postponing a mutual meeting or a deadline for after the holidays.

Yesterday, I was trying to schedule a catch-up coffee, no real urgency implied, with a local businessman. He replied back saying "let's meet after the x-mas break", so we scheduled for the second week of January.

Similarly, you can use this framework for summer. When you receive emails from people pushing deadlines, deliveries and meetings back to September, you know people are going for the bare essentials.

And here's the gist of it: if you're comfortable postponing it till January, maybe it wasn't all that urgent in the first place. In a way, we could also call it "year-end triage".

Today, I am sending most of my tasks to January 2026 so I can weed out non-urgent stuff. This way, I will be able to focus on what moves the needle for the remaining 20-odd days of 2025. I want to make them count.

In other words, if it's easy to kick the can down the road for a few extra weeks, basking in the fact that a lot of people are winding down for a few weeks, maybe it can wait. And that's how you figure out what's truly urgent: if it can survive the "snooze till next year" test, it's probably not a matter of life and death.

Take it easy.