And so, at 10am on the first Monday of the year, Manchester United sacked Ruben Amorim. Another manager gone,  As a long-suffering United fan, I’d love to tell you this was shocking.  It wasn’t!

However, there was something oddly clarifying about it. By mid-morning on day one of the first week of the new year, someone had made the decision:

This isn’t working. This doesn’t matter as much as pretending it might. And delaying the decision helps no one.

Was that brutal? Yes. But was it clean? Also yes.

And whether you care about football or not, it’s a useful place to start January.

 Why The Year Feels Heavy So Quickly

I have observed that most businesses do not struggle in January due to people lacking energy; if anything, this is the period when energy almost feels optimal, akin to the return to work after a holiday in the sun.  

They struggle because everything feels important at once.

You may have come back carrying:

• unfinished plans from last year
• tolerated issues you meant to fix
• new ideas that feel urgent because they’re new
• expectations that quietly multiplied over the break

However, nothing has been filtered yet and so everything is now competing for attention at exactly the same time.  This can lead to overwhelm  before the year has even properly started.

The Big Mistake January Encourages

On top of that, in January we compound this with a habit of going straight into addition; the new year often means lets add:

• new goals
• new initiatives
• new hires
• new systems

However, very few problems at this stage of the year are solved by doing more first.  They’re solved by deciding what doesn’t matter enough to continue.  That’s what really decisive organisations do best.

How CFOs Actually Think About a New Year

The CFO lens doesn’t begin with ambition, but instead with constraints.  This isn’t because we lack optimism, but because constraints are what defines reality.

E.g. 

Cash is finite.
Capacity is finite.
Attention is finite.
Business owner’s energy is finite.

If we ignore those limits, it doesn’t make the year bigger; it will just make the consequences arrive faster.

A Better Question to Start With

So instead of asking: “What do I want to achieve this year?”

Instead Try asking: “What must be protected for this year to work?”

Protected cash.
Protected capacity.
Protected focus.
Protected energy.

Once those are clear, priorities stop fighting each other.

The Hidden Cost of Not Deciding

One pattern shows up again and again in Owner-led businesses: Good people, with good intent, but suffering from quiet exhaustion.

Not from failure, but from too many things being allowed to stay important for too long.

Every tolerated inefficiency.
Every underpriced piece of work.
Every “we’ll sort it later”.

None of them collapse the business on their own. Together, they make the year heavier than it needs to be.

Clarity doesn’t come from working harder. It comes from choosing less on purpose.

A Simple Place to Begin

I spoke last week about setting targets based on:

“If I could only do three things well this year, what would they be?”

Not tasks.
Not vague intentions.
Decisions.

The answers will reveal to you what actually matters.

What We’ll Do With This Next

Over the next few weeks, we’ll turn this into something practical:

• how to use constraints as filters
• then how to choose less without shrinking the business
• and finally how to map the year simply, without overloading it

For now, resist the urge to fill January with activity. The strongest years don’t start with momentum. They start with decisive clarity.

“You can do anything — but not everything.”  David Allen

Manchester United sacked their manager at 10am on the first Monday of the year.  Whether you care about football or not, there’s something instructive in that level of decisiveness.