How to Reduce Your Stress this Holiday Season by Managing Your Time

Now that Halloween has come and gone, the next couple months will go by in a flash. We’ll be preparing for Thanksgiving dinner and, before you know it, New Year’s Eve will be showing up. With that in mind, we want to concentrate on giving you some tips and tricks to keep your health on track and give you the opportunity to have the best Holiday season you’ve ever had!

We’ll be doing an installment of articles to help you through the Holiday season. Topics will range from meal planning to gift buying to dinner parties and everywhere in between.

Make Time Work for You

Today I want to talk about time. More specifically, how to manage your time to keep your stress levels low and have the opportunity to enjoy friends and family.

The Holiday season is filled with stuff to do. Whether it’s buying gifts or wrapping gifts or going to family parties or going to work parties or putting decorations up or cooking for the family (it makes you anxious just thinking about it!), everything takes time and can seem insurmountable.

Luckily, there are a few steps we can take to put our tasks in order and get our time under control. This way, time is working for us and we aren’t working for time. Putting your list of things to do into perspective can lead you to breakthroughs on how you can get everything done without having compromise on quality.

How to Manage Your Time and Reduce Your Stress

So let’s look at 3 steps, in detail, that we can take NOW in order to manage our time and keep our stress under control this Holiday season:

#1. WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN, IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE

We greatly underestimate in importance of writing things down. Whether it’s a simple grocery list or Big Hairy Audacious Grand goal, writing things down makes them more tangible and memorable. It put them right in front of you for you to see.

This is why the first step we need to take is getting everything on paper. In order to do this correctly, we need to be in the right state of mind and in the right atmosphere. It’s nearly impossible to remember all of the things you have to do when you have kids running around or your at work responding to emails or you’re in a hurry to get to soccer practice. Set quiet time aside be able to sit down and unload your mind.

Basically, you want to do a brain-dump of all the things that you have to and want to get done for this Holiday season. Write down EVERYTHING: putting up decorations, grocery shopping, gift wrapping, cleaning, dinner parties. Get it all out of your head and onto paper.

Once you’ve unloaded everything, prioritize them from most important to least important. Some parties are more important than other. Certain tasks are less important than other tasks. This has to be from YOUR perspective. What is most important to YOU and least important to YOU.

#2. ELIMINATE THE THINGS THAT DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE TO BE DONE

Once you have your list and you’ve prioritized your items from most important to least important, you may have a revelation. You may see some things that really don’t have to be done. Maybe it’s something you’ve done in the past that you thought was important, but now it’s just a burden.

Eliminate the things that aren’t important and don’t make the Holiday season more special and enjoyable for you and your family. These things may be time wasters.

#3. DELEGATE THE THINGS THAT AREN’T AS IMPORTANT, BUT NEED TO GET DONE

Delegation is something that many of us struggle with. Women, in particular, are perfectionists. While men, on the other hand, just want to get things taken care of so they can sit down and watch football. For those of you who are perfectionists, it can be tough to let go. Being in control means you can make sure things are done to your standards.

I’m a perfect example of this in business. As an entrepreneur, I want to be able to do everything for the business in order to make it successful. Not because I think I can necessarily do it better, but because, if I’m doing it, I have control of the outcome. But I’ve learned that there are a lot of things in the business that I do pretty poorly. So I finally gave myself permission to let others help and take control of those areas because they are better at them than me.

Your mission, then, is to find the things that aren’t as important to you. Find the things that can be entrusted to somebody else. Maybe you make the best sweet potatoes and everybody loves them. That means you make the sweet potatoes, but someone else makes the stuffing and the green beans and the broccoli casserole. Maybe decorating isn’t exactly your thing, but you do it anyway because you hate asking for help and bothering others.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help and give responsibility to those around you. If you like things done a certain way, fine. Teach someone how to do it and let it go.

The Holiday season is meant to be enjoyed. Many of us spend this time of year under stress and worried about the next step. Let yourself have a great time this year. Prioritize your list, eliminate the things that aren’t important and give up some of the responsibility to others. At the end of the day, this time of year is about being with friends and family and appreciating the things we have.