Slacking into the New Year

January 5, 2026/Business, Regulations/

We’ve noticed at Funeral Director Daily that readership drops by about 33% in the last half of December. It was particularly noticeable this year as we reached a record of over 21,000 page views in November only to see the latter half of December come in with run-rates of page views at less than 15,000.

However, we also came upon this article from Talker Research that gives us a small glimpse into one possible reason why the readership dropped for that time period.

Talker Research completed a survey of over 1,117 employed Americans and their attitude about “December work”. Turns out that the day that the majority feel is the “Last hard working day of the Year” is December 15. . . .a full two weeks before the calendar year ends. Here’s a quote from the article about the survey results, “Respondents were asked to pinpoint precisely when in December it’s acceptable to take things considerably easier on the work front, with December 15th the average date cited.”

We know at Funeral Director Daily that about 60% of our readership reads FDD at work on a desktop computer. Obviously, if these readers are not going into the office those last two weeks, they are also not reading Funeral Director Daily. It’s a double edged-sword for us. . . we love having engaged Death Care workers reading FDD, but if they are not going into the office, FDD will probably not get read.

For those of us in the “older employed” category you can probably identify with some other results of the survey such as the following:

Younger generations were much more likely to admit they’re hoping to get away with doing less for the end of the year, with 54% of employed Gen Z and 48% of millennials doing this. That drops to 44% of employed Gen X looking to take things more lightly, while only 37% of boomers currently working said they’d look to do the bare minimum until next year.

And, 35% of workers said “It’s never acceptable to ease up at work.”

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: At Funeral Director Daily we don’t get too worked-up about the lower number of readers for the last two weeks of the year. It’s been a pretty standard formula over our short history and then we build up readership over the winter months before retrenching a little during the summer vacation months and building back up in the Fall of the year. The readership cadence of the year seems to follow that pattern and if we are honest about it, there is probably a general and regular “cadence” in the work-flow at a funeral home and other businesses too.

As for your funeral home and/or other business the article from Talker Research also gives some good advice on how to make the end of the year more productive for you and your staff. The article states that “it is normal to slow down and sometimes even healthy if the team leader acknowledges that slowdown.”

Talker Research concludes with this idea of how to organize work for your organization during the last two weeks of the year, “Reframing this period in your organization as a “review window” rather than a “launch window” allows you to wrap up those loose ends, write down ideas, make plans (not implement big initiatives), and permits you to slow down, which isn’t failing; it’s simply how people need to get ready for the next wave of momentum.”

After seeing that advice I can actually see the merit in having a couple of short “review windows” during the course of the year to allow team members to get caught up with new initiatives that they haven’t fully grasped as yet. Once a team member is “caught up with and grasps” the previous objectives and intiatives they will be more fully engaged in learning new initiatives.

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