We spoke with time management expert Laura Vanderkam about how to make room in our schedules for the unexpected—freeing ourselves to enjoy the holidays with less stress.
Does it sometimes feel like when the holidays come around you have less time?
Between the festivities of Thanksgiving and the bustle of Christmas, I notice feeling like I have less time and more to do. I don’t actually have a job that gets busier at the end of the year, and I still have the same number of hours in a day. But there are more things to cook, usually more events to attend, more cards to send, and more gifts to give than at any other time of the year.
A lot of our holiday activities bring joy to our lives, but when we haven’t built time for them into our already busy schedules, our day-to-day sanity hangs in the balance. There’s nothing that can suck the joy out of making your family’s prized casserole like fielding work emails at the same time.
We need to give ourselves some slack.
By slack, I don’t mean giving ourselves a free pass to drop some balls—although that has its time and place. I mean that in order to get through the holidays with both grace and completed checklists, we will benefit from building slack into our schedules. Unexpected things will come up, or holiday events may take longer than expected, potentially pushing other obligations to the brink. If we build in time, knowing this will happen, we will be less surprised and more able to revel in the joys of the season.
Time-management expert Laura Vanderkam shared insights about slack building in her 2015 book I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of their Time. Vanderkam spent years studying numerous working women’s time logs before sharing insights about how women in different careers and states in life make things work. The result is an encouraging compilation of possibilities readers can try on for size in their own lives, all while learning to understand the distinction between the removable limits we put on ourselves and the limits we truly need to work within.
I interviewed Vanderkam for insights on how we can tailor slack-building habits to the holidays.
Put aside a day for “whatever comes up” and personal pursuits
When it comes to how working women can factor slack into their weeks and months in preparation for the holidays, Vanderkam told me, “I try to leave Fridays relatively open. It tends to be a slower day in general, and by not scheduling things, it’s available if things come up during the week or if you need some extra time for personal pursuits.”
If setting aside a whole day isn’t feasible for you, try to set aside a morning or afternoon, or even a few hours. The point is to give yourself some margin.
Put time limits on the tasks that are time-sucks
We all have those tasks, at home and at work, that end up taking up way more time than we want or expect them to—for instance, holiday shopping. As fun as it can be, it’s easy to get lost in it, especially online. Putting limits on tasks like these by scheduling them for a set time can help us keep them from taking over. One possible time to pencil them in is on the days off we’ve set aside.
“If you know you’re going to do, say, online shopping on Fridays at 3 p.m.,” Vanderkam notes, “that can keep this from always being an option—and distracting you from getting professional stuff done!”
Be creative fitting in holiday traditions
In much of her work, Vanderkam emphasizes fitting in the things that bring us joy and enhance our most important relationships; doing so not only improves our lives but also perhaps our creativity, which can help us feel less drained and more fulfilled as we do other home and work tasks. With that in mind, you can feel less guilty making time for holiday fun in the middle of your workweek—or even at the start of the week!
“It’s certainly fun to build in holiday traditions to the first part of the week. Mondays tend to be terrible—but they’re a lot better if you’re baking cookies with your kids or visiting a lights display somewhere at night!” Vanderkam says. “If you’re working from home, you could put mini-traditions into your breaks: making hot chocolate at lunch, working on a Christmas Lego set, that sort of thing. That said, most people experience the bulk of their leisure time on the weekends so that’s when most of the holiday traditions would go.”
Prioritize your favorite holiday traditions—especially those that foster connection
Laura Vanderkam once shared at Verily how, even as a busy author and mom, she still likes to send old-fashioned Christmas cards. “We have time for anything that matters to us,” she says.
What are the Christmas traditions that mean the most to you? Do you like to hike to a real farm to pick out a real tree? Put up an intricate outdoor light display? Send handwritten Christmas cards? When we feel overwhelmed, some seemingly time-consuming traditions may be the first ones on the chopping block.
But if we look closer at how we use our time, we might just find room for our favorite holiday habits.
For example, when it comes to Christmas cards, Vanderkam says they don’t have to take a ton of time. “Choose a photo and get them printed up from some place like Shutterfly,” she suggests. “If you’ve never made a list of names and addresses before, this will take some time, but it’s a good excuse to reach out to people you haven’t heard from in a while. Most likely they’ll be thrilled to share their postal addresses—everyone likes real mail that isn’t bills!”
The last step—stuffing and addressing the envelopes—is where things can stall. “Pace yourself.” Vanderkam advises. “If you’re sending 60 cards, you can do 20 one day, 20 the next, and 20 after that, and wow, you’re done. To be honest, most of us probably spend this amount of time looking at people’s Instagram photos.”
Practice good work boundaries and self-awareness
For those of us working from home, there are also WFH hacks that can help build in slack. “In general, be very careful about saying yes to things,” Vanderkam advises about the holidays. “Take on the big, exciting professional stuff that feels energizing, but don’t volunteer for meetings you don’t need to attend or extra work that can be pushed into the new year.”
Also try to keep a check on your willingness to accept optional tasks that will land right around the busiest holiday times. “Whenever you’re asked to take on something in the future—say, for mid or late December—ask yourself if you’d do it tomorrow. If you wouldn’t, well, probably best to say no for the future, too!” Vanderkam says.
Be fair to yourself
When the pandemic hit, Vanderkam authored the WFH-inspired ebook The New Corner Office, offering immediate help to women managing competing work and homelife obligations. So when it comes to working women who are stuck in situations where kids are trying to learn virtually under their supervision, and it may feel like breathing during the holidays, much less the day-to-day, is unimaginable, Vanderkam gives some hope.
“It’s easy to focus on everything that feels out of control, but that’s not a helpful narrative,” she says. “Each day, identify a few things that went right—when you really knocked it out of the park, professionally and personally. Plan your weeks on Fridays, and figure out what absolutely has to happen professionally and personally. Figure out when you can do these things. Then just stop worrying about everything else.
