Take it easy in January. Image licensed via Adobe Stock
Your brain is a potato, your bank account is empty, and Mother Nature is begging you to hibernate. So why don’t we listen?
Many moons ago, in January, I did something pretty dumb. I sat down on the 3rd, still bloated from selection boxes and feeling guilty about the state of my inbox, and decided to launch a completely new creative sideline. New logo, new website, new positioning, the lot. I spent three weeks agonising over colour palettes whilst wrapped in a duvet, drinking instant coffee—because I’d run out of the good stuff and payday was still a fortnight away.
By March, I’d binned the entire thing.
Here’s what I learned: January is possibly the worst month of the year to make any significant creative decision. And yet we’re practically conditioned to do it.
“New year, new you!” the Instagram posts scream. “Time to pivot!” LinkedIn insists. “Reinvent yourself!” shouts every productivity guru with a course to sell.
But I’m calling BS on all of it.
Your brain is a potato
Let’s start with the obvious: your brain is not operating at full capacity in January. You’ve just emerged from December, which for most of us meant approximately 47 social events, enough cheese to sink a battleship, and the cognitive load of buying presents for people you hadn’t seen in yonks and whose hobbies and interests you’d largely forgotten.
I remember sitting in my home office one grey January afternoon, trying to write a proposal for a dream client. I stared at the screen for two hours and produced three sentences, two of which were complete nonsense. And I’m not alone. My friend, a graphic designer, told me she spent an entire week in January working on a logo she described as “looking like a child’s drawing of a nervous breakdown”. We laugh about it now, but at the time, she genuinely thought she’d lost her creative powers, and it was all downhill from here to the retirement home.
She hadn’t, though. Her brain was just exhausted. The combination of post-holiday comedown, vitamin D deficiency, and the general existential dread that comes with facing a blank calendar can make even the most brilliant creative feel like they’re thinking through treacle. This is not, in short, the state in which to decide whether to take on a business partner, pivot your entire practice, or commit to a year-long project.
The wrong season
I’m not normally one for hippy talk; “aligning your chakras with nature” and the like. But there’s something to be said for recognising January is, you know, the middle of winter. Everything in nature is resting. Trees aren’t producing leaves, bears aren’t planning their spring expansion strategy, and squirrels aren’t launching new product lines.
Yet we creatives typically sit in our cold studios and offices telling ourselves to generate Big Ideas and Make Important Decisions whilst it’s still pitch black at half four in the afternoon. It’s madness, really.
The problem, in my view, is that we’ve created this artificial urgency around January. The Babylonians got it right: they celebrated their new year around the vernal equinox in mid-March, when things were actually starting to grow and bloom. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that a date on a calendar should override millions of years of evolutionary programming that says, “hunker down and conserve energy during winter.”
Also, none of these “New Year New You” posts ever seem to mention that January’s when most of us are flat broke. If you got paid early in December, you’re facing six weeks until the next payday. Meanwhile, the credit card bill from Christmas has just landed with a thud. This is not a great headspace from which to make major creative decisions.
One year, a friend decided in January that he would leave his agency job and go freelance. Nothing wrong with that in principle, except he’d just splurged his savings on presents and a week in the Cotswolds. As it was, he spent six months panicking like crazy about paying his rent. If he’d waited until March or April, when he’d had time to save properly and think clearly, things might have been easier.
Financial stress makes us desperate, and when we’re desperate, we make poor creative decisions. We say yes to projects we should decline. We undercharge because we need the cash now. I’ve done both of these, multiple times, all in January.
Fight the FOMO
So why are we compelled to upend everything in January? Well, social media is usually at least partly to blame. Everyone’s posting their goals, their achievements, their new ventures. “I’m launching my podcast!” “Starting my novel!” “Building my empire!” And there you are, still in your pyjamas at 2pm, wondering if you can legitimately count watching a documentary as professional development.
January, in short, always makes us feel like we need to justify our existence. We’ve had time off, we’ve been unproductive, and now we need to prove that we’re serious, committed, worthy, just like all the creatives we admire and follow online. So we come up with grandiose plans that sound impressive but aren’t what we actually need.
Ultimately, making major decisions based on FOMO whilst you’re in the midst of vitamin D deficiency is a recipe for disaster. Trust me, I’ve been there, bought the T-shirt, and then regretted the T-shirt by spring. So what should you do instead?
In short, the exact opposite.
How to handle January right
Give yourself permission to do absolutely nothing of major consequence in January. Use it as a month for gentle reflection, not decisive action. Keep a notebook, jot down ideas, but treat them as seeds that might grow into something in spring, not as action plans to implement immediately.
I now have a rule: no big creative decisions before March. January is for tidying my office, organising files, and doing the boring admin I’ve been putting off. February is for gentle planning: looking at what worked last year, what didn’t, and what I might want to explore. March is when I start making actual decisions about what I’ll do next.
If you absolutely must do something in January, make it small and easily reversible. Try out a new technique on a personal project. Experiment with your social media content. Sketch some ideas. But please, please, please don’t quit your job, completely pivot your creative practice, or invest your savings in a new venture. Wait until you can see your decisions clearly, when the fog has lifted, and your brain is functioning properly.
February will still be there. March will arrive. And when spring comes, the days get longer, and you’ve had time to actually think clearly, you’ll be in a much better position to make decisions that will serve you well for the rest of the year.
