When the Holidays Disrupt Your Routines

how to make progress while prioritizing rest

Photo of tea and notebook in front of fireplace by Rafael Leão on Unsplash

We’re entering the time of the year where routines get upended—whether that’s due to holiday travel, increased caretaking, or pressure to grade 150 final projects in one week.

Depending on your job, you might have time off for holiday vacation—which means you might feel an urge to set yourself up for an at-home retreat, taking advantage of extra time to focus on a writing, creative, or home project.

I think that solo and group retreats are an amazing way to increase efficiency and delve into a state of flow for our projects. In order to get the most out of a retreat, we might schedule ourselves like we’re having a workday—9 to 5 spent writing with one hour for lunch—but I invite you to be cautious of overscheduling yourself just because your calendar is suddenly free of meetings.

I’ve written about my own struggles with overworking during time off. I sometimes turn to “sneaky productivity” when my spouse is traveling for work and I’m left to my own devices AKA no one is around to catch me working in the evening. And when I’ve actually had a week off of meetings and calls when I house and dog sat for a friend, I struggled with overworking instead of using the time off to rest and create and spend time in the woods. In both cases, I’ve often chosen work over play and rest, and ended up regretting that decision, which showed me I had to be very intentional around how I schedule time off.

But “burning myself out by overworking” and “ignoring my project until January” aren’t the only two options available to those of us who’d like to nestle in for some intentional productivity over our breaks. Today I’m sharing a few tips to set yourself up for meaningful progress on your project while also prioritizing rest when your routine shifts:

• Use the Must-Do Approach to account for personal resource expenditure on ALL tasks.

• Create a menu of tasks to choose from based on how you’re feeling each day.

• Make a rest and restore toolkit to weave rest into your days.

MUST-DO METHOD

I love the Must-Do Method, which I first learned about from Sarah Knight. If you’ve worked with the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, the Must-Do Method is similar but adds the component of scheduling. Because I’m invested in making productivity feel more accessible for everyone, I’m also interested in how the Must-Do Method can help us preserve our precious personal resources of time, energy, and focus—both physically and mentally.

By its very nature, our to-do list is bottomless: we can always find something else to do to work ahead and set ourselves up for success in the future. When we use the Must-Do Method, we strategically schedule the tasks on our to-do list for the days when we truly need to do them to ensure that we don’t overtax ourselves unnecessarily. During the holiday season, you might have additional tasks on your to-do list like driving your kids to or from events, assembling gifts for loved ones, attending appointments you scheduled for your “time off,” or completing a travel itinerary. While something like an appointment might be one-and-done, other tasks might require prep time, scheduled days ahead. Using the Must-Do Method also means we don’t schedule tasks earlier than they truly need to be done—so if your laundry can wait until the weekend, schedule it for the weekend instead of at the end of a long day of errands.

You can read more about the Must-Do Method here.

MENUS

I bet that you’ve worked hard to set up your usual routine in a way that protects your time and energy. You might already know when to take breaks, how much work you can do in an hour, etc. But when we experience a season where we suddenly have more or less availability and we need to shift our personal resources to extra tasks outside of our usual work, it can be difficult to accurately choose an appropriate task for a productivity session.

An exercise that can help here is determining a menu of tasks that would be accessible depending on the time, energy, and focus levels you have available to you. The first step is to identify different “types of days” you might experience, such as days when you’re experiencing increased fatigue, days when you are working from home or campus, or days when you have short bursts of time to work on your projects. After you’ve named your types of days, the next step is to identify which tasks would be most accessible to you if you had that type of day. For example, if you have a day when you can’t focus for long amounts of time, it would be strategic to reach for tasks you can pick up and put down as needed—or if you have a day when you are working in your favorite location and you have high energy, you might choose to work on more complex or challenging tasks.

You can learn more about setting up menus for different types of days here.

REST AND RESTORE

If your schedule is off, you might feel rushed and overwhelmed by responsibilities or deadlines, so it’s especially important to ensure you’re building in time to rest and tend to yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally. In my experience, when I’m feeling stressed out, it can be hard for me to pause and choose to take a break because I might be experiencing urgency or worry that I need to complete my task and do it well. But honestly, stepping away to take a break is just what I need—not to make me more productive, but to help me feel better in general.

To have a valuable writing or creative retreat, it’s important to protect your energy. I encourage you to take some time to sketch out when you will take breaks and to brainstorm what you may want to do during your breaks—whether that means 5 minutes between Pomodoro sessions to stretch and look out the window or closing your laptop at 3pm to go for a walk around the river. The purpose of writing down a list of rest activities ahead of time is to streamline the decision to shift away from your project—if you’ve got a list to choose from, you eliminate decision-making.

You can learn more about prioritizing rest during productivity sessions here.

When we put the must-do method, menus for types of days, and our rest toolkit together, we’re more likely to protect our personal resources during seasons of shifts in our routines.

If you’d like support in setting yourself up for intentional productivity across multiple seasons, I’m currently accepting Success & Accountability Coaching Clients to begin working together in January 2025. This timeline is perfect for academics who want to have a sustainable Spring semester and make real progress on projects including books or book proposals, dissertations, year-end reviews or tenure and promotion materials, and job applications. If you’re curious about how coaching can help you, I invite you to:

• Check out my client testimonials

• Learn what’s included in Success & Accountability Coaching

• Schedule a 30-minute call to chat about how I can support you

Take good care and talk to you in a couple weeks with an extra special interview!

Dr. Kate