You Can Control Your Holiday Season (to Some Extent…)
Before Thanksgiving my neck of the woods caught on fire. I mean this literally. We lost over 5,000 acres of forest here on the border of New Jersey and New York. I just had my one-year anniversary of moving into my condo in West Milford. I moved here specifically for the glorious hiking. It saddened me deeply to see what I sense are climate changes taking place in my own backyard as the smoke wafted in through my HVAC system. I often wished I had used my organizational skills to go into a career saving our planet. But alas, I did not.
The firefighters used a lot of backburning to steer the flames away from where they did not want the fires to spread. I thought an analogy of this controlling technique could equate to how some folks respond to the intensity of potentially hot family and financial heat during the holiday season.
So, I was thinking that backburning your time management in December could be as simple as 1, 2, 3…
- Block out your chosen available time on your calendar that you would like to use for social gatherings.
- Block out your chosen available time on your calendar that you would like to use for seasonal tasks – shopping, wrapping, decorating, baking…
- Block out your chosen available time on your calendar that you would like to leave empty for any type of self-care – meditation, massage, streaming Netflix…We all need this during the holidays!
This is called Time Mapping. We can’t control what others will do or say this holiday or any day but you can make up your own mind as to what goes on your personal calendar. If you don’t plan your holidays, someone else will.
Before Thanksgiving my neck of the woods caught on fire. I mean this literally. We lost over 5,000 acres of forest here on the border of New Jersey and New York. I just had my one-year anniversary of moving into my condo in West Milford. I moved here specifically for the glorious hiking. It saddened me deeply to see what I sense are climate changes taking place in my own backyard as the smoke wafted in through my HVAC system. I often wished I had used my organizational skills to go into a career saving our planet. But alas, I did not.
The firefighters used a lot of backburning to steer the flames away from where they did not want the fires to spread. I thought an analogy of this controlling technique could equate to how some folks respond to the intensity of potentially hot family and financial heat during the holiday season.
So, I was thinking that backburning your time management in December could be as simple as 1, 2, 3…
- Block out your chosen available time on your calendar that you would like to use for social gatherings.
- Block out your chosen available time on your calendar that you would like to use for seasonal tasks – shopping, wrapping, decorating, baking…
- Block out your chosen available time on your calendar that you would like to leave empty for any type of self-care – meditation, massage, streaming Netflix…We all need this during the holidays!
This is called Time Mapping. We can’t control what others will do or say this holiday or any day but you can make up your own mind as to what goes on your personal calendar. If you don’t plan your holidays, someone else will.
