The post-holiday funk is here. How to reset your work in 2026

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That low-energy, post-holiday funk we often see in early January probably isn’t laziness.

Everyone’s still in vacation mode, leaders might think.

Experts say it’s a predictable psychological and organizational response to unclear priorities, depleted energy, and restarting internal systems without recalibrating them first.

Leaders who respond to it as if it’s a morale problem tend to slow momentum even more. Leaders who treat it as a systems design problem can reenergize their teams quickly.

Why does this happen in the first place?

There are four primary reasons, according to a recent Forbes article:

1. The year’s mental fatigue accumulates in December.
2. Rewards don’t feel as rewarding in December, because many of the goals set by work teams are long-term and unresolved, and motivation is largely shaped by how strongly the brain anticipates reward.
3. People disengage from goals in December. It’s a natural and healthy stress-management function. “This is because adaptive goal disengagement helps reduce stress, depressive symptoms, and emotional exhaustion when goals become too demanding relative to available resources,” Forbes writes.
4. Seasonal changes make work feel harder in December. Fewer daylight hours are linked to changes in mood, energy levels, and brain functioning.

So how do we get back into the swing of things in healthy and efficient ways?

“The most effective leaders will come back in January willing to confront the structural issues driving overwhelm and fatigue at work,” said Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey, a leadership adviser. “The 'new year, new you' that will serve leaders best is not armed only with shiny new ideas for training, strategic initiatives, or tech tools for their teams to take on. Rather, they will normalize honest conversations about capacity, priorities, and energy management to help their teams perform sustainably.”

Specifically, Dewey said, this could look like: 

• Subtract before you add. 

“Recognize that something has to give,” Dewey said. “Undoubtedly, there are new initiatives, procedures, demands, or challenges facing your team this year. What can you sunset to make room for the effort they will require? Normalize the process of validating past commitments before adding new ones with your team, and watch their willingness to work for you (yes, even when they do have to do more with less, for a moment or more) multiply.”

• Build agency, not enthusiasm. 

“We all know clients and KPIs kick in on January 1, and they require action,” she said. “And, leaders do not have total control over when, where, or how their teams work, much less what they do. But there are some pieces of your team's experience that you can control. Be transparent about what those are and collaborate to make them feel like mutual wins. This will build more trust and sustained motivation than trying to defend the party line or get them excited about the 'silver lining' of a five-day-a-week return to office.”

• Work toward an early, achievable win.

“Mutually agree on a goal — maybe even something leftover from year-end — that the team would be gratified (and ideally, externally recognized for) to achieve,” Dewey said. “Make it truly bite-sized so it can be done — and celebrated — before the end of the month.”

The idea of structuring for early, achievable wins was echoed by Andrew Cussens, CEO of FilmFolk, a team of studio creatives for hire that includes cinematographers, animators, photographers, and editors.

“Energy leaks when teams return to fuzzy priorities, bloated timelines or work that feels stalled before it has taken off,” Cussens said. “We reframed January in short, shippable milestones rather than annual objectives. The day that we transitioned the team from planning abstract work to 10-14 day production sprints with known output is the same day our turnaround time dropped a solid 20% and internal feedback rounds steadily decreased month over month.

“We make a point in January to clear up confusions by assigning one owner to each project, defining what is 'done', and to constrain creative choices as soon as possible,” Cussens added.

Bill Joseph, founder and CEO of Frontier Blades, an e-commerce retailer of outdoor survival and sporting equipment, talked about the seasonality of Frontier Blades’ business and the strategic pivoting they do to combat the sales swings.

“We encounter a fairly intense ‘rush’ during the holiday season,” Joseph said. “This involves a relative and comparative increase in sourcing, fulfillment, and crisis management. As a result, the drop in sales and activity following the holidays and into the beginning of the new year can be a bit jarring, as the silence of the slower season can diminish our momentum. 

“To counteract this, our team pivots their attention towards R&D,” Joseph said. “This strategy involves active recovery through creative work. During the final quarter of the year, our entire focus is dedicated towards logistics, prioritizing speed, accuracy, and customer service. This results in a complete pause in innovation and creative, in order to ensure execution.”

Following the holidays the Frontier Blades team channels that energy into growth and development, Joseph said.

“We use the lull as an opportunity to address high-leverage creatives, including long-form blog content, NPI and product listings, optimizing technical & on-page SEO, and testing new sales channels,” he said. “This approach enables our team to transition from the burnout of repetitive order processing and fulfillment to more "lower pressure" long-term creative work. Thus, we are able to leverage the post-holiday slump as the primary time-period to build the infrastructure for the subsequent year's growth. 

“For us,” Joseph said, “momentum doesn't necessarily mean doing the same thing over and over again, but rather keeping the engine running by shifting gears.”