Flourishing Today

Make it through New Year’s, without melting down

First, let me start off by apologizing for not getting this post out sooner, in time for friends and family who celebrate Hanukkah!  Happy (day-after) Hanukkah, and  congratulations on surviving 8 days of holidays.  You deserve to be appreciated for pulling everything together, especially when the holiday surprised many (including myself), with how soon it came!

For my friends who celebrate Christmas:  You’re probably just ramping up, aren’t you? I know I am.  This year I even took on being accountable for some of the stocking stuffers, as the first holiday after my dad’s passing.  Little did I expect how the holidays were going to hit me, but then, we rarely expect how the holidays are gong to affect us, even when we think we’re prepared.

So here are a couple tips, for getting through the rest of the month:

Take some time to identify your priorities: You’re not going to be able to get everything done by yourself.  If you try, you’ll probably be ready for the mad house, come January.  Take some time to make a list of the priorities.  To get a good picture of what’s going on, I’ll make my list first, and then mark them with RED, YELLOW, and GREEN.

• Red are items that are critical, and MUST happen.  These are things like making necessary travel arrangements, making sure you get to a child’s holiday play/event.  These are also things you need to do to take care of yourself, in order to stay sane in the next coming weeks, like 15-20 minutes of meditation a day to handle any building up stress.

• YELLOW are items that are important, but the world won’t stop if they don’t happen. In my world, these are things like, making home made pies.  Yes, I need to make sure the pies I committed to happen, just like I need to get my step-mother some gluten-free recipes.  But they don’t NEED to be homemade, and I can wait until I’m in San Francisco to look up recipes if I can’t get it done beforehand.

• GREEN are items that would be nice to accomplish, but they’re not worth losing your sanity over.  For me, these are things like Christmas cards. I’d love to have the time to hand-write Christmas cards the way I used to.  I don’t have that kind of time and I’m not going to punish myself because they don’t happen.

Schedule them out: Putting tasks on a calender can help prevent that last minute jumble.  If you know you’re doing your shopping online from 8-10pm after kids go to bed, then you know when shopping is going to happen and how to manage your time around 8-10pm.  Christian and I use Google Calendar heavily, to co-ordinate our schedules, especially during the holidays.  Being able to pull up both calendars and see where/when we have time blocked out can help keep us from scheduling into the other person’s time – especially if we’re seeing something critical.  It also gives us a way to help each other.  If I see a task like “Pick up Honey-Baked Ham” on his calendar, I can offer to grab it while I’m taking care of “Pick up Gluten-Free Pecan Pie” on my calendar.

Give yourself some extra space: No one likes to be in a rush.  I try to book in an extra 10-15 minutes over the amount of time I actually think things are going to take.  At this time of year, people are stressed, travelling, and anxious to knock off their own “To-Do” lists.  Booking that extra time helps keep me from feeling rushed, and gives me extra space in case something unexpected happens.  Of course, if I finish early I can always reward myself with a nice cup of tea…. Or that meditation time I missed this morning! Woops..

Good luck!

Kaye