You are borrowing time from November

There are about ten working days after the summer break where your calendar is genuinely negotiable.

After that it sets.

Not because anyone decides it should. Because the recurring invitations reappear, the escalations resume, and by the third week the week has exactly the same shape it has had all year.

From the first week of September, it is roughly twelve weeks to Black Friday and fifteen until the business shuts down for Christmas.

That is the real clock. Not September.

And the planning for those twelve weeks has to happen somewhere.

It does not go away because there is no room for it. It gets compressed into whatever time is left after the meetings, which means it happens in October at speed, or in November when it has stopped being strategic and become bloody critical. You know that feeling.

So the meeting you sit in this week is not free.

You are paying for it in November.

You have been here before

Most leaders I speak to have already run their own version of this very thing.

You came back in January with a clear view of what needed to change. You cleared two recurring meetings. You blocked Friday mornings.

It held for about five weeks.

By March one meeting was back under a different name, the second had become a Slack thread that reached you anyway, and Friday mornings were gone.

The usual explanation is discipline.

It slipped. You got busy.

That is not what happened.

The meetings came back because nothing about who decides was changed.

You removed yourself from the room. You did not move the decision out of the room.

So the decision followed you. Like it always does until someone else officially has it under them.

Eventually the meeting reassembled around it because that was still the shortest path to getting an answer. You.

A calendar is a record of where authority sits.

Change the calendar without changing the authority and it reverts.

Every time.

Here is my own version

For years, at Quiksilver and then across EMEA retail, I came back from August and went straight into business reviews. Because that is what we always did.

Numbers from twelve markets. Everyone in the room. First week back.

Nobody had had five minutes. And no one had really looked at the numbers either.

The teams had not had time to pull the analysis, form a view, or bring conclusions. I sat in anyway, because it was the most tangible thing available and because those meetings genuinely matter for winding a business back up.

I thought I was the added speed in those rooms.

I was the thing slowing them down.

But the real cost was not the hours.

It was what I was in the room doing.

I was helping discover the information.

That is not the job.

The job is receiving it, already formed, and then deciding what the business does about it.

When you spend the week helping assemble the information, you leave yourself very little room to make the decisions the information is supposed to support.

And those are the decisions that actually matter in September.

Whether the margin roll-up holds, or you take price to offset the costing.

Whether a go-to-market that is not executing gets fixed or gets cut.

Whether you pivot while there is still time to pivot.

Make those calls in September, with information the team has properly worked, and you are ahead of the season.

You are building an outline that can be course-corrected as the weeks come in.

Make the same calls in mid-October and you are reacting.

Make them the evening before a launch and you are not deciding at all.

You are absorbing. Under significant stress.

Same decisions.

Completely different value.

The year I stopped

Two things changed.

The teams got the time they actually needed to come back and form a view, rather than performing one in front of me.

What came to me was a conclusion, not a spreadsheet in progress.

And I got fifteen weeks.

Not free time.

Planning runway to the biggest trading period of the year, with the milestones mapped while there was still room to move them.

When the trade information did come through, it landed on a plan instead of replacing one.

The work was the same work.

It was business strategic in September instead of business critical in November.

One thing to do in the first week back

Take the recurring meetings that have reappeared in your calendar since you got back.

Find the one where you are the most senior person in the room and the least necessary.

Do not just drop it.

That is what failed in January.

Name who holds the decision in your place.

In writing. In front of the team.

Then let the first one go through without you and resist asking for the summary.

Dropping the meeting moves the task.

Naming the decision moves the authority.

Only the second one survives October.

And there is another consequence.

The room you leave is also the room where your team builds the judgement you are currently supplying.

They cannot bring you a formed view if they have never had to form one without you.

Fifteen weeks from now the business closes for Christmas and you will take stock of the year.

Not just the numbers.

The role.

Whether it looked like the one you were promoted into or the one you were doing two years ago.

The question is whether you spend those fifteen weeks running the plan or catching up with it. If the move holds, you are looking at a completely different November and December.

Andrew