Ninety Days of Open Bar

Open your calendar and scroll to the middle of October. Now keep scrolling until New Year’s.

If you’re like most guys who run something, that stretch is about to fill up with evenings. The client dinner that’s “long overdue.” The industry mixer. Your buddy’s fortieth. The vendor holiday party. Your own holiday party. Friendsgiving. The bourbon tasting you said yes to in July because July you is an optimist. Your kid’s school thing, which isn’t a bar but somehow still ends with a glass of wine.

Count them. Most operators I know land somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five evening events between mid October and January 2nd.

Here’s the problem. That’s also the stretch where the year gets decided. Deals close or die. Budgets for next year get approved. Your team needs you sharp for the push. And every one of those evenings sends a bill to the next morning.

Monday we built a cash reserve for the fog. Today’s about the other reserve you’re about to burn through, and this one doesn’t sit in a bank account. It’s your capacity. Your mornings. Your ability to be the guy who’s actually good at 9am on a Thursday in December.

Let me be clear so nobody unsubscribes out of spite. I’m not telling you to quit drinking. I like a good bourbon as much as the next man, probably more. And I’m not pretending the social side of the season doesn’t matter. It matters a lot. Some of the best business I’ve ever done started over a drink at a holiday party.

What I’m telling you is that you’re about to walk into the booziest, busiest twelve weeks of the year with no plan, and “no plan” is a plan. It’s the plan where you say yes to everything, drink whatever’s handed to you, and spend December feeling like you’re working through wet cement.

We’re going to replace that with an actual plan. Seven moves.

First, let’s name what you’re actually paying.

The drinks aren’t the expensive part. The next morning is. Alcohol helps you fall asleep, then wrecks the second half of the night. You get less of the deep, restorative sleep your brain needs, you wake up more, and you start the next day on a battery that never fully charged. You don’t need to feel hungover for this to happen. Two or three drinks at a dinner is plenty.

Most men don’t notice the cost because they’ve never measured it. They just think December is a hard month.

So measure it. I run Rize in the background on my machine, and it tracks how much real focused work I do each day without me logging anything. A while back I compared my focused hours on mornings after an evening out to my normal mornings. The gap wasn’t subtle. I was losing somewhere around a third of my best hours after a “light” night, and closer to half after a real one.

Now do that math across twenty events. That’s not a few rough mornings. That’s weeks of your best work, gone, in the quarter where it counts most.

Run it for yourself for two weeks. Once you see your own numbers, you won’t need me to convince you of anything below.

Before the invitations pile up, get ahead of them.

Pull out your calendar and put every known evening event between October 15 and January 2 on it. The ones that are confirmed, the ones that are probable, the ones that happen every year whether anybody sends an invite or not.

Then triage every one of them into three buckets:

Here’s the thing about C events. It’s easy to decline in September. It’s awkward to decline three days out. The same “I’ve got a conflict that night, but I’d love to grab lunch in January” sounds gracious today and flaky in December. Do the declining while it’s cheap.

Then set one rule: no more than two evening events per week. If a week already has two, a third one has to be an A to get in, and one of the other two gets bumped. Your calendar is a budget. Treat it like one.

Every bad night starts with the same decision, and it’s never made at the bar. It’s made at 3pm when you didn’t decide anything.

Nobody ever said at 9:45pm, “You know what, I’ve had enough.” Nine forty-five you is a terrible negotiator. He’s warm, he’s having a good time, and somebody just ordered a round. You have to make the call earlier, while you’re still the guy running things.

So decide at 3pm. Write it down if you have to. My default for a business event is two drinks, max, and I’ll tell you how that holds up in practice:

Here’s something I learned from a guy who owned half the commercial real estate in his county. He never went to an event without a job to do. Never. He’d tell me on the drive over: “Three conversations, one introduction, one follow-up I can book tomorrow.” Then he’d do exactly that and leave.

That’s the move. A holiday party is not a night off. It’s a room full of people you’d normally have to chase for a meeting, all standing still, all in a good mood. Treat it like the opportunity it is.

And the next morning, the follow-ups go out before 10am, while everybody else is still nursing a coffee and trying to remember names.

At some point someone’s going to hand you a drink you didn’t order, or give you a hard time for holding a club soda. You don’t need to explain yourself. You just need a line you’ve said before so it comes out easy.

A few that work:

That last one is my favorite. It shuts down the conversation, it sounds mildly interesting, and most people are too polite to push.

Here’s the other secret: just keep something in your hand. People only push drinks on empty hands. A club soda, a half finished beer, whatever. Nobody notices what’s in the glass.

If you’re the one throwing the event or taking the client out, you have more control than you think. Use it.

The default is a dinner that starts at 7, runs until 10, and involves a bottle of wine per two people. It’s the most expensive format there is, both on the card and on the next morning.

Swap it out:

Some nights are going to go long. That’s fine. Plan for them the same way you plan for a travel day.

This is exactly where Rize earns its keep again. Once you know which mornings are going to be weak, you stop pretending otherwise and schedule around them.

This is the one that’ll surprise you.

Look at the season you mapped in move one and find two weeks with the most important work in them. Maybe it’s the week before Thanksgiving when you’re trying to close the last deals of the year. Maybe it’s the first week of December when you’re doing next year’s planning. Pick two.

In those two weeks: zero. Not one drink. Just two weeks.

Here’s what happens. Your sleep comes back. Your mornings sharpen. You notice how much better you feel by the third day, which makes the other ten weeks easier to manage. And you get two weeks of clear headed work in the stretch where it matters most.

It’s not about proving anything. It’s about putting your best hours where your biggest decisions are.

One last thing, and it’s not about business.

The season doesn’t only run through your calendar. It runs through your house. Your kids have their own events. Your spouse has plans for the holidays that you haven’t heard about yet. And after a stretch of back to back client dinners, the people at home get the version of you that’s tired, short, and half asleep on the couch.

They didn’t sign up for that. Your clients got the best of you. Your family got the leftovers.

When you map your season in move one, put the family events on the calendar first, and treat them like A events. Because they are.

“Drinking is part of my industry.”

So is showing up sharp the next morning. Nobody’s asking you to stop going. I’m asking you to go with a plan. The guys who last in drinking heavy industries aren’t the ones who keep up. They’re the ones who pace.

“People will think it’s weird.”

Nobody’s paying as much attention to your glass as you think. And the people who notice are usually impressed, not put off. Being the guy who’s sharp at the end of the night is a reputation worth having.

“I’ll just push through.”

You will. You’ll push through twenty mornings at half capacity and then wonder why December felt so hard. Pushing through is not a strategy. It’s what you do when you didn’t have one.

Before you close your laptop:

Twenty minutes. That’s what it takes to walk into Q4 with a plan instead of a hangover.

Friday, we’re talking about the thank you most men get wrong every single December.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus