Time-Saving Tips for the Holidays

When was the last time you had a really relaxing holiday? I don’t mean that peaceful thirty-minute aftermath that follows a successful dinner party or the kids’ gift-opening extravaganza. I mean a holiday that is relaxing, from beginning to end. That includes travel, dinner preparations, and shopping. All it will take is a little organization and advance planning. Here are some tips to get you started.

Plan your travel now. Need to be out of town to see family or friends? If you haven’t already made arrangements, make it a priority. Especially if you plan to fly, the best deals disappear fast. Get online and start shopping around as soon as you know where you need to be and when. Once the arrangements are made, start getting things squared away with work. Whether you need to request time off, reschedule a recurring meeting, or just let your employees know that you’ll be gone, do it as soon as possible. Depending on where you work, getting holiday time off can be competitive. Especially in this case, the early bird tends to get the worm.

Mark your calendar. Sit down with your DayTimer® and plan backwards. If you want your holiday cards to go out on December 20, when would you need to buy the cards, get the stamps, write the newsletter insert (if you do one), and start addressing in order to make that happen? Think backwards through the entire process and write the individual steps down on the to-do list for each date. Same with your holiday meal, gift shopping, and tree decorating. When would you like to be done, what are all the steps, when would each need to start, and write them down.

Make a budget. Unless you’ve got more money that you know what to do with, it is easy for the holiday season to turn into a financial headache. Ninety-nine percent of that stress can be eliminated by thinking ahead and making a budget. Financial sanity doesn’t come from having a ton of money; it comes from spending it wisely. Decide how much you’re going to spend and stick to it. Letting yourself creep over your budget probably isn’t going to make you a hero in the gift department, but it might cost you a gray hair or two when it comes time to sort out the holiday bills. How many times have you charged expensive items and spent five months paying for them? See if you can break tradition this year by drawing names or just sending cards. Tell the people you’re not buying for that you’ve pared down your gift list out of necessity and ask them not to buy for you as well.

Avoid the shopping marathon. Unless you really do enjoy the “shop ‘till you drop” marathon mall sessions, skip the all-day shopping trips. If you start now (or better yet, six months ago), you’ll be amazed at how much you can get done by picking up an item here and there while you’re running your everyday errands. The secret is to sit down, make a list of the people you need to shop for, and keep it with you. Ideally, your list will include one or two gift options for each person, too. Keep your list with you and cross off a few people every week. Also keep your eye out for stocking stuffers and similar small items. And as for that whole Black Friday thing – if you don’t enjoy it, skip it! Unless shopping is in your blood, the money you’ll save probably isn’t worth the aggravation.

Wrap as you go. Don’t put all of your wrapping off until the last minute. As you pick things up, go ahead and wrap them as soon as you get a chance. Wrap a couple extras for a guest who shows up unexpectedly and gives you a gift. It helps to have a dedicated wrapping area cornered off that is well-stocked with all the essentials – wrapping paper, scissors, gift tags, tape, etc. The easier you make it for yourself, the more likely you are to get it done.

Simplify, simplify. No matter how cool your friends and family might play it, you are NOT the only one who gets stressed out around the holidays. If the stress of preparations is getting out of hand, don’t be afraid to propose a simplified pot-luck dinner instead of a more elaborate affair or a gift exchange instead of shopping for everyone individually. Even if you just try this approach with a small group of friends or extended family, it’ll be at least a small relief for everyone involved. When it comes to reducing you holiday workload, every little bit helps.

Make friends with the Internet. More and more shoppers are finally taking the plunge and skipping the traditional brick and mortar stores completely. Internet shopping has come a long way in the last few years and you might be surprised at how simple it has gotten. You can easily compare prices and can generally find good deals on shipping that will guarantee arrival in plenty of time for the big day.

Play your cards right. Many people take one look at that mound of Christmas cards and can suddenly think of three or four other things that require their immediate attention. We love getting cards but hate the prospect of doing ours. So we procrastinate until December 22 and pull another 2:00 a.m. shift to get them in the mail by Christmas. So, I look at my cards as a process. Breaking the project down into smaller pieces makes it seem more manageable. You can even begin now! The first thing I do is create the labels. Second, I stick them on the envelopes with a return address label and stamp. Next, I write the family newsletter and get it copied onto the special paper. Finally, I set up an assembly line: (a) add a salutation to the card such as “Dearest X Family,” (b) sign our names, (c) enclose the newsletter and a picture, and (d) seal the envelope with a sticker. No licking for me! If you prefer to hand-write your cards, the trick is to write five each day, starting the day after Thanksgiving. Take some with you wherever you go, in case you find some free time: at the doctor’s office, waiting for a meeting to begin, or picking your child up from a lesson.

Cheat. Unless you really enjoy preparing mass quantities of food from scratch, there’s no reason not to take advantage of a short-cut or two. Particularly when it comes to the dessert menu, there are plenty of quick and easy mixes that can help you shave some serious time off of your meal preparation schedule. Just go to the grocery store and find a few easy-to-make offerings or buy something from the deli. For a special touch you can dress your desserts with extra holiday sprinkles or a squiggle of chocolate sauce across the plate for a very restaurant-looking presentation.

Give yourself the gift of time. How about purchasing a few months of housekeeping instead of clothes? Purchase a gift certificate to a restaurant so you don’t have to cook. Have the veterinarian groom your dog instead of doing it yourself, being soaked, and making a mess. Buy a book on tape to listen to in the car on the way to work. Purchase a cell phone and eliminate phone tag by forwarding your calls when you leave the office. Have your groceries delivered once a week for a month (less than the cost of a blouse). Hire a teenager to do the major cleaning required before houseguests arrive.

Remember your priorities. Take shortcuts where it really doesn’t matter: buy cookies instead of baking them or barter a task you don’t like for one you do. I know two women who trade chores at holiday time. One hates to bake; the other hates to do crafts. So one woman decorates the other’s home and wraps her presents beautifully; the other does the meal preparation and holiday baking for the other! Cut out as many social engagements as possible if you want more family time—you can’t go to a school musical when it’s more convenient. Kids appreciate happy and relaxed parents more than perfect decorations.

Get moving! However you choose to get a head start on the holiday season, you won’t regret putting in the extra effort early on. Keep yourself motivated by thinking about how nice it will be to cruise through the end of December stress-free and full of holiday spirit. You might make a date with yourself to visit the mall on the last weekend before Christmas—just so you can observe the mayhem you successfully avoided by being so productive!


Make it a productive day! ™

(C) Copyright 2007 Laura Stack. All rights reserved.

This article may be reprinted provided the following credit line is present: “© 2007 Laura Stack. Laura is the president of The Productivity Pro®, Inc. and the bestselling author of Find More Time and Leave the Office Earlier. She presents keynotes and seminars on time management, information overload, and personal productivity. Contact her at 303-471-7401 or www.TheProductivityPro.com.” The link to Laura’s website must be active.

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Q: Dear Laura,

I attended your webinar Friday with a colleague and we both enjoyed it. I like your energy and your spin on things. I’m looking forward to reading one of your books soon. Thanks for all the tips; it was a great and worthwhile experience. I asked my question too late (I submitted it as you were saying you would take one last question) so I decided to email it to you.

To give you a bit of background, I have been at my current position for just over 1 year. Before this I skipped around from job to job and jumped into this head-first. I did not finish college and do not have any professional training as an administrative assistant. Before me, my boss had never had an admin. He is famous in the world of solder and has an extensive travel schedule.

Do you have any suggestions on how to communicate with your boss who is never in the office? My boss is constantly traveling around the world and can not always respond to emails or voicemails. It's hard to communicate all the information in the 15 minutes we might get every other day. He is constantly traveling from China to San Francisco to Europe and back. It’s hard to catch him at a time where I’m not sleeping or he’s not at a meeting. When he does get a chance to answer the phone he is normally in a taxi and doesn’t have the information in front of him. When he comes back from a 2, 3 or even 4 weeks on the road there is so much information to catch him up on that we spend hours on end going through it. He normally gets pulled away to a meeting and then we still have questions unanswered. Since I do not have a technical background I can not answer the technical questions that he receives. Our department consists of less than 20 chemists and technicians. I try to delegate some of the questions to them, other than that I don’t know how to handle this. Any ideas?

Thank you,

Lara

A: Lara,

Rest assured that this is not just your productivity challenge; it’s his as well. He is partially sabotaging you in your efforts to help him. We’ll need to pull him into this discussion as well. If you “finally get a hold of him” and “he doesn’t have the information with him,” there’s not much you can do. He needs to ensure he has shared his travel schedule in detail with you and established set check-in times on a regular basis (even from your home periodically—use comp time). Make sure his cell phone is able to connect internationally anywhere he is going. He should get into the habit and discipline of telling the taxi driver to put his briefcase on the seat with him, so he has the information you need for your calls readily available. Be organized before you call, so you can ask your questions quickly. The most important thing is that you can communicate when you can’t speak “live.” He needs international service on a handheld such as Treo or Blackberry, so he can check and respond to your emails, which you can receive when you get to work. He should have you check his email for him on his main email account and forward to a different email account the ones you can’t handle. That way you can keep up with printing documents and handling requests yourself, so you don’t have so much to print and organize when he returns and unloads on you. Find out the location of the hotels where he’ll be staying, so you can fax a list of questions over to him if necessary, which the hotel can print and have ready for him on arrival. Most important is finding a hotel with Internet access and getting him to log in and handle things regularly, so your clients aren’t waiting “while he’s out of the country.” With the Internet, that’s just not a good excuse anymore. I fielded your question to my colleague and friend, Terry Brock, a guru on using technology to build relationships (www.terrybrock.com), who suggests “You can use audio (MP3) to respond quickly. The boss can give a quick summary of important things that need to be done into a digital voice recorder. Then it can be listened to at a convenient time by the staff.”

So plan ahead and plan often! Create a checklist that you fill out for him before every trip. Before I leave for a speaking engagement, my assistant Dana has completed my checklist and made sure we have everything we need to stay in touch while I’m gone and organize the trip. I can sense your frustration but wonder if you have communicated with him the extent of the productivity drain it places on you. Put a high priority on having a heart-to-heart next time he’s back in the office. Terry says, “The first and most important aspect (of this situation) is not technological. The boss must be willing to listen and hear. If that condition doesn't exist, then no matter what technology is deployed, it will be a waste. The boss must devote serious, uninterrupted (read, "Turn the @$!# cell phone off!") time to hear what the staff has to say.”

Productively yours,

Laura

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