The week between Christmas and New Year, for proposal teams
The slowest week of the year has a use. Five low-overhead rituals that cost an afternoon each, capture the year's learning, and set up the team for a clean January. What to do when nothing is landing.
The week between Christmas and New Year is the slowest week of the proposal year. Buyers are not posting. Clarification windows are paused. The team that is in the office is smaller, the inbox is quieter, and the deadlines landing in early January have already been scoped.
This is a genuine gift if you use it. Here are five low-overhead rituals that a small team can run across the week, each costing an afternoon, that compound into a much cleaner January than the default.
1. The library freshness pass
One afternoon, two people. Export the list of KB blocks used in the last quarter. Tag each one as: current (owner confirmed this quarter), stale (owner has not touched it in six months), or unknown (no clear owner). The afternoon produces a work queue for January, not a set of rewrites. The rewrites happen later. The afternoon’s job is only to sort.
This ritual pays off in the next DDQ. An answer flagged stale in December is an answer that does not ship to a buyer in February without a refresh.
2. The win/loss record reconciliation
Many proposal functions carry a win/loss tracker that is slightly out of sync with reality. The bid marked “pending” in June was actually lost in September and nobody updated the record. The bid marked “withdrawn” was actually won on a different SKU. An afternoon’s reconciliation with the sales function produces the clean record that the year-end retro and the annual Research team synthesis both depend on.
Leulu’s piece on why post-mortems rarely happen applies here — the reconciliation is not the post-mortem, but it is the prerequisite. A retrospective against a wrong record produces wrong conclusions.
3. The template spring-clean
Open the response templates. Read the first two pages of each one. Mark the sections that have not been updated since 2024. Mark the templates that reference a product version that has shipped past. Mark the boilerplate that feels dated. Do not fix any of it this afternoon. Produce the work queue.
The templates are the most-used artifacts in the library and among the least-audited. An hour of reading produces weeks of clean-up that pays off across every bid in 2026.
4. The annual retro
Scheduled for the 29th or the 30th, with the full team on video if possible. The retro template walks through the specific questions; the ritual here is making the meeting happen. Annual retros do not happen by default; they happen because somebody puts the calendar invite on the team’s schedule before the holiday.
The output of the retro is an action list with owners. The action list lives in the library, not a slide deck, so the items do not evaporate by February.
5. The 2026 calendar block-out
Pull out the known RFP release dates, recurring DDQ renewals, and the top five accounts’ fiscal calendars. Block them against the team’s 2026 calendar. This is not a commitment; it is a visibility exercise. When somebody asks in March “why is April booked,” the answer is “because the April DDQ wave is locked.” Blocking it out in December means it was visible before it arrived.
What not to do this week
Do not send “just checking in” emails to buyers. The buyer is not in the office. The email lands on January 5th as a second-tier item in their inbox, and it signals that your function does not respect the calendar.
Do not ship a major product or process change that will need onboarding. The people who would onboard are not around. The change rolls better on January 5th with a prepared comms and a full team.
Do not write bid proposals speculatively. If a bid is not active, it is not active. Drafting speculatively against a theoretical future RFP is a use of time that does not compound.
What to actually do with any leftover time
Read. The annual reading list landed yesterday. Books and essays outside the proposal bubble are the things that make January’s work feel new, and the hours between now and Sunday are a legitimate time to take them.
The week has a use. Use it on the things that pay out in January, and leave everything else alone.