It’s that time of the year again: you start to see a dip in productivity and begin to experience migraines on a daily basis. And between holiday shopping and overloading on carbs, it’s not a surprise you have no energy to do anything, let alone be productive.
So the goal here is not to help you be productive (because we know that’s not going to happen). Rather, the goal is to help you steer clear of migraines and to prevent your workload from morphing into the all-consuming blob.
3 Tips to Manage Your Workload During the Holidays
Here are 3 quick tips to keep your sanity intact and under control this holiday season.
Plan Ahead
November and December seem to be one big holiday. You have days off, office parties, family get-togethers, and lets-have-a-potluck-during-office-hours-because-we-feel-like-it. Before you know it, January 2nd is here, and it’s time for you to face the music. To avoid this, you need to plan ahead. If you have projects due in the last half of December, do it when you have the time. Break it up into segments and chip away at it piece by piece. Your slow weeks may seem like the ideal time to get lost in BuzzFeed articles, but if you work on that December project instead, you’ll thank yourself later.
Prioritize your List
Or, at the very least, make a list. Gather all your to-dos, tasks, and projects and assign deadlines to them. If you can’t fathom assigning an actual due date to any of them, then rank your items by importance. If you get halfway through your list by the time Christmas rolls around, then you’re probably better off than most of your coworkers. And the same goes for personal tasks: if you make a list and stick to it, your shopping trip during lunch will take 30 minutes instead of an hour and a half.
Know When Coworkers Will Be Out
While everyone in your office might be checked out long before the holiday rolls around, find out when the MVPs in your professional and personal life will be physically checked out. If you’re banking on completing a project with the help of a coworker, and then that coworker decides to take off to Hawaii for the last two weeks of December, you’ll be working on that project all by yourself and probably be harboring some resentment when the new year rolls around. And be sure to inform your team of when you’ll be gone as well, in case someone in the office was hoping to get you to edit a document while you plan to be in the Poconos. Communication goes a very long way, especially during the holiday season.