4 Ways to Manage Your Time During the Holidays

During the holiday season, it often feels as though life is pulling you in a dozen different directions. We know that our best work is done when we are most focused, but how do we do that during such a demanding time of the year?

There are several strategies you can use to help you manage your time wisely this holiday season. First, figure out where you have opportunity for growth in the skill of time management. A few sub-skills of time management include understanding where your time is being spent, prioritizing where to spend your time, staying organized, and communicating expectations. Below are a few ideas for how to practice each sub-skill.

• Account for your time. Start with a simple time journal. Use a planner, notebook, or Excel sheet to account for your time in half-hour increments throughout the day. Label activities with simple categories, no more than ten. At the end of the week, add everything up and reflect on the totals. You’ll notice some categories that need rebalancing.
• Prioritize your time. Make a simple list of the things that need your time throughout the week. Instead of ranking them, put these things against each other, head-to-head, and proclaim a winner. For example, if exercising is head-to-head with cooking dinner, which would win? If it’s exercising, you won’t feel so bad about ordering in on the nights that you spend time exercising. Or, if grocery shopping went head-to-head with family dinners and family dinners wins, you won’t feel bad about splurging to have your groceries delivered. Prioritizing is a great way to make dozens of future decisions at once.
• Stay organized. If you know how you want to spend your time, but it just seems to get away from you, it may help to find a better organizational system. Try physically blocking out time on a calendar to do even the most trivial things. Or set up a paper calendar or Excel sheet to block out your days. Then, schedule in everything you want to spend time on. This even includes the 30 minutes you want to sit down and watch a TV show or the hour you want to use to online shop. If something else threatens to derail your schedule, ask yourself which thing falls more closely in line with your priorities. Give your time to the thing you’ve chosen to prioritize.
• Communicate expectations. The people in your life should be working with you, not against you. If you don’t clearly communicate your expectations for your time, however, they don’t know how to help. For example, if your coworkers don’t know that you’re trying to stay away from your email in the evenings, they may pester you with hard-to-resist emails after work hours or give you a hard time for waiting to answer an email until the morning. Or, if your family doesn’t know that you’re working hard to schedule intentional self-care time into your day, they may pressure you to get up from the TV in order to check something off of a to-do list. Once you know your priorities, share them with others in your life so that they can help you stay on track.

Time management is a trainable skill. In order to get better at it, we need to practice it more intentionally and reflect on what works—and what doesn’t work!—for our lifestyle.