When You Say Next Year
What "next year" usually means, how to tell timing from avoidance, and what to do with the decision you keep moving.
By James Schramko · Updated September 2026
Somebody asks you a direct question about your business and you answer with a date. Next year. After the holidays. Once this launch is out of the way. When things settle down.
I hear it every week, and I have said it myself. It sounds like planning. Most of the time it is a decision you have already made, presented as one you are going to make later.
What the date is doing
A real date is attached to something that changes. The lease ends in March, so March is when you move. The developer finishes in six weeks, so the new site goes live in six weeks. You can point at the thing the date depends on.
The other kind of date is attached to nothing. Ask what will be different in January and the answer is usually silence, or a vague hope that there will be more money, more time, or more certainty. None of those arrive on their own. The business in January is the business you have now, with three more months of the same numbers behind it.
When the date is attached to nothing, "next year" is a ranking. It means the thing is not important enough to displace what you are already doing. That can be a perfectly good answer. Plenty of things deserve to sit at the bottom of the list. The problem is that we rarely say it that way, and so the item never gets properly killed or properly started. It just floats.
Why bigger decisions float longer
The decisions that get deferred the most are rarely the small ones. They are the ones with resistance on them. Hiring the person who costs real money. Cutting the service line that pays the bills but eats your week. Raising prices on the clients who have been with you the longest. Getting help when you have always done it yourself.
Resistance is uncomfortable, so the mind reaches for a way to stop feeling it without giving anything up. A date does that job beautifully. You get the relief of having dealt with it and none of the cost of actually deciding.
After a couple of decades of watching owners do this, myself included, one pattern holds. The size of the resistance tracks the size of the outcome. The choice you least want to make is usually the one that changes the most.
The Stoics had this worked out two thousand years ago. Seneca wrote about people who put off living until some later point, and observed that while they were waiting, life went past them. Marcus Aurelius kept returning to the idea that the thing standing in your way is the way. Neither of them was writing about business, but the pattern is the same. The obstacle you are steering around is usually the work.
What deferral costs
Whatever you have parked, price the wait. If the thing works, every month between now and the date is a month you ran without it. If it does not work, you find that out later than you could have, and you carry it the whole time in between. Either way the cost is the same wait, and the decision itself is no easier at the end of it. You just meet it later, with less runway.
If you want a different result, you have to do something different. Next year is where that something usually goes to not happen.
The test
Take the thing you have said next year about. Run it through three questions.
What specifically changes between now and the date? If you can name it, the date is real. Keep it, and write down the trigger so you know when it fires.
If nothing changes, is it simply not important? Then kill it. Take it off the list, tell the people who were waiting on it, and stop carrying it. A dead item costs nothing. A floating one costs attention every time you see it.
If it is important and nothing changes, ask one more thing. Is it sitting behind something you have already committed to? Then it is a trade-off. Write down what it is behind and when that finishes, and that becomes its real date. If you cannot name what it is behind, you have found the resistance. That is the one to walk into. Do the smallest real version of it this week. Send the price increase to one client. Post the job ad. Book the conversation you have been avoiding. Resistance shrinks the moment you touch the work, and it grows every week you plan around it.
How to apply it
Every 12 weeks, list every decision you have deferred with a date on it. Most owners find five to ten. Put each one through the three questions above and sort them into three piles: real date, dead, or resistance.
The real-date pile needs a trigger written next to each item. The dead pile goes. The resistance pile is your actual plan for the next 12 weeks, cut to what you have capacity for. It is usually short, and it is usually where the growth is.
Then notice the phrase when it comes out of your mouth. "Next year" is a useful alarm once you know what it means. Every time you hear yourself say it, ask what changes. If the answer is nothing, you have just found the decision to sort today.
Deferred decisions are one of the first things I look at with founders inside Mentor. A year of the same numbers usually has a few of them behind it.