The Quiet Week: How to Use the Lull Between Holidays to Reset Your Work Brain
Don't rush into resolutions. First, close the tabs.
We have arrived at my favorite week of the year.
Some call it the “Dead Week.” Others call it “The Void.” I like to think of it simply as The Quiet Week.
It is that strange, blurry span between Christmas and New Year’s Day where time feels suspended. Nobody knows what day of the week it is. It is socially acceptable to eat cheese for breakfast. And, miraculously, the emails have stopped.
For the other 51 weeks of the year, we are in motion. We are shipping, solving,
replying, and pushing.
But this week offers us a rare invitation: To stop.
The Pressure to Rev Up
If you are anything like me, the silence can feel a little unnerving. You might feel the itch to fill the void with planning.
The cultural messaging right now is loud: New Year, New You. Crush Q1. Set your 2026 Strategy.
We feel the pressure to sprint into January with a perfect plan. But trying to plan your future before you have processed your past is like trying to build a house on un-surveyed land. You might build it fast, but you won’t know if the ground can hold it.
Closing the Mental Tabs
Before you set a single goal for 2026, I invite you to use this quiet week to do something gentler: Look back.
Think of your brain like a browser window with 50 tabs open.
The project that went sideways in March.
The client win you never really celebrated in October.
The vague feeling of burnout you pushed down in August.
You cannot focus on what is next until you close those tabs.
Honest reflection is a form of strategy. When you take the time to document what actually happened—the money you made, the energy you spent, the boundaries that held and the ones that broke—you stop operating on autopilot .
A Container for Your Reflection
You don’t need to do this in a rigid way. You just need a container for your thoughts.
I designed the Quarterly Reflection & Planning Toolkit for exactly this moment.
It isn’t a complex strategic planning document. It is a guided workbook that helps you:
Capture the facts: What actually happened last quarter (no spin, no guilt).
Check your energy: Notice what work lit you up and what drained you .
Plan with reality: Set goals based on the resources you actually have, not the ones you wish you had .
Download it. Print it out. Pour a coffee. Sit in the quiet of this week and just fill in the blanks.
You don’t need to have the whole year figured out by January 1st. You just need to know where you are starting from.