The holiday season can be a tough chunk for most working people. This can become especially challenging when you are expected to continue your work from home, handle a business, and have a limited time window to plan and organize things. We all have some pending work for the holiday season, and it can be disappointing when we are unable to achieve our target in our off days.
Staying focused and organized during holidays comes as the number one priority for people in this regard. When you are able to achieve focus, it becomes easy for you to do all the pending tasks you are supposed to do during holidays while also enjoying the time.
If you have no idea how to do so, we are here to help because this article aims to give you a direction for how to stay productive and motivated for the holiday season and get all the work done in time.
So, check out these seven hacks to stay organized and focused during the holiday season.
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1. Plan and Start Ahead
Planning ahead is one of the fundamental steps you need to take care of when it comes to staying focused and organized. Keeping everything in your mind is not going to help you in the long run. You will have to come up with a plan all sorted out in front of you. For that reason, it is crucial to plan ahead of time. You also have to ensure that everything you scheduled makes sense in the order that you have planned for.
- The key is to note all your important tasks for the week and categorize it accordingly. When you stay ready and prepare a map in your mind, be rest assured that you will be prepared for the best to come.
- When you follow a schedule starting ahead, it will become convenient for you to move accordingly and complete tasks, whether related to work or house responsibilities.
- Also, if there is a situation where your schedule gets disturbed one way or the other, you can take your time to bring this around and eliminate the stress, all thanks to planning and starting ahead.
2. Begin with the End in Mind
Whenever you start making a schedule, you must realize the goals you want to achieve by the end of the day, month, or year. That is important because you would know what you want to get and what results you should expect by the end of the course.
Also, you need to consider the motivation level that comes with beginning with the end in mind. When you start to imagine a good outcome of something, you can devise a better plan and then implement the plan accordingly. This is how anticipating in the start will help you in various ways.
For example, you have a goal to achieve a weight loss of 4 kilograms in one month before Christmas. To stay productive and focused, you will consider yourself achieving that target by the end of the month. There might be a pair of jeans you want to fit in, which will give you motivation.
3. Get Rid of Distractions
Getting rid of possible distractions helps you successfully stay focused on your goals in the long run.
- When you sit for doing work, understand that you have to put away your mobile phone and focus on doing the task you are assigned. As you begin to do this, you realize you can do your work fast and easily.
- One way to get rid of distractions is to sit in a comfortable and quiet place.
- Turn on only a limited number of devices that help you complete a task instead of distracting you.
- What’s more, you need to see what it is that you want to achieve in a limited time. There are certain apps on your phone that you can use to limit your mobile phone use. There is a certain time frame given to you in which you are not able to use any kind of app.
- Also, you must build in yourself an internal motivation that allows you to stay productive for a long time. It means that instead of looking for an outside source of motivation, there must be an original sense of motivation built in yourself that helps you to sustain the spirit. You need to associate a value and a belief with the work you want to do in life.
4. Clean it Well and Keep It That Way
It can be usual for you to get somehow lazy and not want to work during the holiday season. But the more you stay careless about the cleanliness of your workstation or space, the lesser you will be able to organize and function with smoothness. It is best to stay as vigilant as possible when organizing things so that doing tasks doesn’t become challenging and messy and delays things.
- In your schedule, allot time to declutter the stuff you don’t want or won’t need by sorting out items you may or may not need.
- If there is something to recycle, try to recycle it at the earliest to keep your items minimum.
- Also, you need to focus on separating different things based on their types or usage for improved organization. For example, if there is stationary in your room, you need to dedicate a separate cabinet for such items.
All this will make it easier for you to find different things in times of need and complete your work on time without struggling.
5. Use the Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro technique is undoubtedly one of the best techniques you can use for effective time management. It is especially suitable for people who find it hard to stay focused, which is an even bigger problem during holidays as there are lots of distractions and less motivation to keep working in full form. So, taking the help of some calculated technique will help a lot in this case.
The Pomodoro technique is an effective strategy that requires you to concentrate fully on a task for a set time and then take a quick break in that order.
For example, if you want to read through a research article in a said time, you can give yourself 25 minutes to read it and then spend the rest of 5 minutes on the half-hour clock to relax or use apps you like. Spend another 25 minutes to read another article and take a little break, and so on. This is how technique Pomodoro works.
6. Make the Best of Eisenhower Matrix Works
Eisenhower matrix is another strategy that helps manage time and prioritize work accordingly. Now, there are four different sectors for it:
- Urgent work
- Non-urgent work
- Important work
- Non-important work
You can put your different tasks in each section. You will need to choose the urgent and important quadrant first. Then, you will need to select the non-urgent and the non-important task quadrant second. Choosing to do work in this order will help you get your tasks sorted accordingly.
Eisenhower matrix helps you actualize your work and see where you are lacking in terms of your organization. So, don’t give yourself the disadvantage of not prioritizing work in terms of its urgency or importance.
This is an essential useful thing to do in holidays as it can get confusing when deciding the order of the tasks. You will also realize that there are certain tasks that you don’t need to do at all, as seen in the non-urgent, non-important category. This will save you from a lot of time wasted in the end. The more you stick to this plan, the more you can stay organized during holidays.
7. Refresh and Improvise
You also need to be able to refresh and improvise your to-do list. There are certain elements you need to keep in mind in this regard. For example, if there is a sudden event with your family members to attend to, you need to improvise your plans accordingly. Don’t make your schedule so tight that you cannot adjust your plans when a change is necessary.
Improvising on time is another critical requirement. It is only possible when you give value to your free time as then you are better able to make adjustments in your routine. So, always have some space in your schedule to adjust the pending tasks of the week or the day. This thing will save you from last-minute rush and trouble.
Wrapping It UP
So, now you know how to stay focused when working during holidays.
Undoubtedly, one of the most important things you need to understand to stay motivated and focused during holidays is to stay vigilant and organized as much as you can. When you are able to sort it out, you will note that it is not challenging to focus on your work productively and activities during the holiday season.
