My son Tom started college this week.
New place. New routine. New people. New timetable.
And presumably several new reasons why getting out of bed before 8am is completely unreasonable.
It feels like a proper fresh start for him.
And it’s made me realise that September has always felt much more like New Year to me than January does.
There’s something about everyone coming back from their summer holidays, the schools and colleges starting again and diaries suddenly filling up that makes September feel like business properly switches back on.
It’s also the time of year when you start hearing a familiar phrase:
“We really need to get that done before Christmas.”
We all have those projects.
The new website that was supposed to launch earlier in the year.
The email marketing you were going to start doing regularly.
The CRM that needs sorting out.
The case studies that need writing.
The campaign you’ve been talking about launching.
That thing you agreed you’d “pick up after the summer”.
Well…
This is after the summer.
The good news is that there’s still plenty of time.
I think we have a tendency to get to September and mentally start winding the year down.
But we’ve still got almost a third of 2026 left.
That’s a significant amount of time to get something done.
You could launch the website.
You could finally start emailing your database.
You could test that campaign you’ve been talking about.
You could sort out the bit of your marketing that’s been irritating you all year.
Or you could simply get one of those projects that’s been hanging around since the spring properly over the line.
The danger is leaving it another month.
Because September has an annoying habit of becoming October very quickly.
Then suddenly you’re looking at December diaries, Christmas parties and people saying:
“Shall we just pick this up in January?”
And another year has disappeared.
So perhaps September really is the better New Year.
Not because we need another enormous list of resolutions.
But because it’s a natural point to look at the year so far and ask:
What’s the one thing I’d really like to have finished before Christmas?
Pick it.
And get it over the line.
Tom gets a new timetable.
The rest of us get four months to finish our homework…
Have a great week.
