Best Results Organizing

Did December sneak up on you? Were you so focused on Thanksgiving that when you got to the other side of it last week and flipped the calendar page, you gasped to realize how little of the year was left and how much was suddenly (or still) on your plate?

Today’s post offers some cut-to-the-chase advice for organizing your December life, whichever way your sugar cookie is crumbling right now. 

DON’T BE LISTLESS

Even Santa can’t keep it all in his head. No matter how organized you are throughout the rest of the year, December often feels like people are whizzing tennis balls at your head from all directions. As I wrote about in Paper Doll on the Magic of Making Lists, a good list can help you brainstorm, set and maintain boundaries, recognize your priorities, organize your mind, relieve anxiety, and aspire to greatness.

A good list, especially in December, can help you brainstorm, set and maintain boundaries, recognize your priorities, organize your mind, relieve anxiety, and aspire to greatness. Share on X

Get in the habit of writing everything down the minute you think of it; don’t trust that you’ll remember it later. It doesn’t matter whether you create your lists digitally or on paper, as long as you commit to putting them in one place and referring to them often. However, for lists you’ll be referring to annually, you may find it easier to keep organize digitally so they’ll be easier to update from year to year.

Create Gift Lists for Others

Obviously, it would have been better keep a running list all year, and to have taken notes when inspiration struck or clues were dropped. But meet your holiday shopping conundrums where they are, not where you wish they’d be.

Start by listing the people for whom you need/want to buy (or make) presents and note what you know they like. This may seem obvious, but keeping a written list will ensure you won’t have seven gifts for one person and none for another. Have a column on your lists to keep track of which gifts you’ve already purchased and for whom so when it’s time to wrap them, you can do it quickly (or even delegate it to your favorite Santa’s helper).

Made in Santa’s Workshop Photo by Samuel Holt on Unsplash

If you can get giftees to share clues or you can find their Amazon wish list, all the better. Otherwise, whenever possible, let the internet do the labor for you. There are numerous blog posts with titles like, “Best Holiday Gifts for Teenage Girls” or “Best Presents for Seniors.” While nobody wants to be a stereotype, everyone would rather get a present that’s at least somewhat apt for them rather than a generic candle or picture frame.

Don’t forget “white elephant” gift exchanges and gifts or gift cards for the people who make life better for you and your family, like teachers and service providers.

(Consider wrapping gifts as soon as you buy them, complete with a gift tag with the recipient’s name. Wrapping two or three gifts a night is less exhausting than having to lock yourself in a room for two hours to conquer everything.)

Create a Gift List (and a Gift) for Yourself

The surest way to be disappointed in the holiday season to hope you’ll be surprised and delighted by receiving gifts from people who either aren’t good at it, or who’ve embraced learned helplessness. Don’t be a martyr. Be clear about what you want.

If you are the partner in a couple who takes on all the emotional labor (year-round, but especially at the holidays), you may find that each year, you’re the recipient of last-minute gifts. And I always hear about children pointing out that Daddy and all of the kids have full stockings hanging from the mantle, but Mommy’s is empty. This is the year to up-end that unfortunate tradition.

Keep a gift list of what you want, either specifically or categorically, and don’t feel at all guilty saying what you don’t want. (Nothing that brings you more labor!)

Share the link to your Amazon or other wish lists, and let go of the idea that if someone really loved you, they’d know what you want. Some people are just really horrible at buying gifts and lack the gene or skill for listening for clues all year. (Note: this advice assumes your person is otherwise stellar. If failing to really “know” you is the least of the reasons why your partner is on Santa’s naughty list, I’m not being snarky when I say to give yourself the gift of counseling to see if that is not the right partner for you.)

As for someone not picking up the slack, leaving you with all of the emotional labor and mental load, it may be helpful to re-read a post from a different holiday season, Paper Doll’s Pop Culture Guide to Decluttering with Your Valentine, which covers navigating these kinds of imbalances regarding expected responsibilities. Then you may want to check out Dr. Regina Lark and Judith Kolberg’s Emotional Labor: Why A Woman’s Work is Never Done and What To Do About It.

Outline a No-Surprise Budget

Most people don’t create holiday budgets, and when they do, they focus on gift budgets. But the holiday season means shopping for more than gifts, including decorations, food, special event clothing, travel, and more. 

Decide on how much you’re willing to spend on these holiday expenses, and keep a running tally as you go along. If the money appropriated for that category runs out, either make do, or borrow from a different budgeted category. Keeping up with the Joneses in December can make it hard to pay the electric bill in January.

Check out Capital One’s How to Make a Holiday Budget and Stick to it in 7 Easy Steps.

Don’t Just Plan the Big-Deal Meals

Start with your lists of favorite recipes and needed ingredients for shopping and preparing holiday meal, whether it’s latkes on the first night of Hanukkah or the multi-generational family dinner for Christmas or heavy hors d’oeuvres and desserts for a New Year’s open house.

Knowing what you’ll be cooking for what events will help you create the shopping lists for those recipes. If this isn’t your first jingle bell rodeo, then you may have this down. But don’t forget to master plan your regular meals — at last dinners — for throughout the month. With parties at school and in the workplace, and after holiday recitals and concerts, various members of your family are likely to fill up on snacks and noshes and not be hungry at regular meal times. Give yourself a break, and plan ahead that on those nights you can skip the prep and have leftovers or make breakfast for dinner.

Don’t Leave Home Without It — A Master Travel List, That Is

Whether you’re going over the river and through the woods to see the USA in your Chevrolet, or you’re jetting off somewhere tropical, you’re going to want lists for getting your home in order (setting the heat, putting the lights on timers, stopping the mail and the newspaper, having someone water your plants), shopping, packing, making travel plans (getting tickets, ensuring passports are up-to-date, making reservations), and more. For help on this, check out:

Paper Doll’s 5 Essential Lists For Planning an International Vacation

Paper Doll on the Smead Podcast: Essential Lists For Organized Travel

Paper Doll Organizes Your Space, Money, and Well-Being While Traveling

Please Mr. Postman (and Yourself) with Card and Mailing Lists

Keep a list of people to whom you want to send holiday cards or to whom you’ll be shipping gifts and care packages. Digital lists allow you to update them, so when you get cards from others, check the return address against your list to make sure nothing has changed.

Check cards and packages off your list and make a note of when you sent them (in case someone asks) and be sure to insure any valuables.

The United States Postal Service have tables of Holiday 2023 shipping and mailing deadlines on the website. At the above link, click the red “recommended shipping dates” to get a sense of when to ship for domestic and international deadlines to get your goodies where they’re going on time.

Then check out my post How to Organize and Track Your Packages and Mail for ways to keep tabs on all of your shipments. 

When To Many To-Dos Make You Forget What To Do

Sit down with your family to map out all the to-do items you can brainstorm. Be sure to keep this list to use as a template for next year.

For example, there might be date-specific tasks, like picking up Aunt Gertrude at the airport, or more general tasks like cleaning and organizing to make your home company-ready or decluttering the pantry so your ingredients are all fresh. 

Don’t Eat Your Heart Out About Giving From the Heart

First, remember that your charitable gifts, whether monetary or tangible, are needed all year long. Don’t feel compelled to do all of your giving in December. Second, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Decide what charities you want to support and give according to a plan, rather than feeling guilty about not giving to every charity that asks. (It’s just like how you should shop based on what you want or need, not because an ad has snuck into your feed.)

When you do make charitable gifts, keep a log of the amounts and the organizations to whom you’ve given so you’ll be prepared when doing your taxes. 

Make Catastrophes Less Catastrophic with Emergency Lists

Being organized doesn’t prevent emergencies, but can make them less anxiety–provoking. One year at Thanksgiving, my sister and I, in separate areas of her house, each used our hair dryers, causing a half-house power outage. (Yay to my college bestie, Mark, for walking us through my sister’s weird fuse box over the phone!) Another year, the night before Thanksgiving, the kitchen sink started leaking flooding the cabinet underneath!

Paper Mommy can recall the number of times I got sick on holidays, particularly getting chicken pox on Easter (which, while not our holiday, made it hard to get ahold of a doctor).

Before you need them, make sure you have numbers to cover various emergencies so you have a better chance of finding help if you need a plumber, electrician, baby sitter, etc., whom you can call during the holiday season, as well as a short list of restaurants, pharmacies, and doc-in-the-box locations open on holidays.

KEEP YOURSELF ON AN EVEN KEEL

All of the foregoing lists can make sure you can keep everything straight. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be exhausted. Here are some ideas so you won’t be one big raw, frazzled nerve by New Year’s Eve.

Practice Graham Allcott’s Battery Saver Mode

Productivity Ninja Graham Allcott has a great newsletter, Rev Up for the Week, that arrives in my newsletter every Sunday. A few months ago, he talked about what I think is an absolutely brilliant way to say “No” in a way that people can actually understand. 

In Battery Saver Mode, Graham talked about how we all reach a point where we’re just a bit of burnt toast. We see this most at (and just after) the holidays. It’s not that we don’t experience burnout and overwhelm at other times in the year, but this is the time of year where everyone is weighed down all at once, running on too little sleep, too much sugar (and maybe adult beverages) and way too many activities and obligations.

Graham makes the point we all recognize, that in order to meet our current commitments, we have to maintain our boundaries and guard our energy by not taking on further commitments.

He calls this concept “battery saver mode,” like how your phone puts you in the low-power red zone and gives you an alert when it hits 20% and then 10% and then shuts down. As Graham says,

“Battery saver mode is the idea that if it isnt a core commitment, I’m committing myself to saying no to it. I’m waiting til I get myself charged up again, and not putting a timeframe on when that’ll be.”

Being honest — with ourselves as much as with others — about what we can take on can make all the difference between maintaining our focus and energy and becoming so scattered that we burn ourselves out.

Prioritize taking care of yourself or you will soon find you won’t be able to take care of anything or anyone else. For more on this idea, I direct you to The Magic of “No”, an article I wrote so long ago that babies born the day I published it can now vote. 

Schedule Time for Yourself

None of us can live only for others. Just as my recent post, Take a Break — How Breaks Improve Health and Productivity, talks about the importance of taking a break from work to keep yourself physically, cognitively, and emotionally vital, it’s just as essential to take these breaks for yourself.

That means that if you have to delegate tasks (even if that means lateral delegation to your partner) so that you get time to eat, sleep, meet up with friends, get a massage, or just have quiet time away from the kids and your mother-in-law, so be it.

Just as you block out times on your calendar for meetings or obligations that benefit your employers or your family members, you need to take time for yourself and self-care.

Figure out and prioritize what parts of the holiday season will give you joy and revitalize you (even if that means taking a few hours to escape the holiday season, itself).  

Think Blue Skies, Not Blue Light

There are three important reasons to limit how much time you spend on your devices, especially at the holidays. First, the more time you spend online, the less time you can engage with the delights of the holidays and the people you care about.

Second, stressful news updates and social media can provoke anxiety in anyone, and can especially lead to feelings of isolation for those without social support during the holidays. 

Third, extended use of devices is just bad for your health. Bad posture from shlumping at your desk, gripping your phone, or hyperextending your neck is all the more problematic in a season of sitting shlepping through airports, climbing ladders to decorate, and sitting on uncomfortable elementary school auditorium seats. Exposure to blue light emitted by phones, tablets, and computer screens can also produce insomnia, which can further impact your ability to focus, either on work or joy. 

I’m not saying to cover your phone in wrapping paper, but limiting your device use may bring back some of the old-time joy of the holidays.

Chill Out

With the exception of college students home for winter break, nobody gets enough sleep or relaxation during the holidays. Lack of sleep can exacerbate stress, and the less recuperative sleep you get, the more you’re putting your immune system at risk just when you’re also being smooched all over by relatives, friends, and random acquaintances who’ve been hanging out with germy (though adorable) grandkids and fellow airplane travelers.

To preserve your physical and mental health, you need relaxation and sleep. There’s an internet full of advice on both topics, so I’ll just share a few ideas.

Practicing mindful relaxation techniques doesn’t have to be a huge thing. If you’re excited to embrace formal meditation, yoga, breathing techniques, or whatever, there are numerous apps for that. 

If you’re not sure what methods you want to try, but know you need some guidance, UCLA has a whole website of guided meditations in multiple languages.

These include “drop-in” meditations in podcast form, as well as longer meditations for health and wellness, body scans, developing lovingkindness, and breathing. Languages offered include English, Arabic, Armenian, Cantonese, Farsi, Filippino, French, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Mixtec, Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and American Sign Language. 

You can download the UCLA Mindful App for iOS or Android at no cost.

Another option is Yoga Nidra, also called Non-Sleep Deep Rest (or NSDR). It combines controlled breathing with comprehensive body scanning to yield a state of heightened awareness and profound relaxation. 

The idea is that NSDR activates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps stimulate the release of serotonin so you can go from stressed out to blissed out. While it doesn’t put you to sleep, it makes it easier to relax so that you can fall asleep. Here’s one example, with more than one million views.

There are oodles of YouTube videos for trying out Yoga Nidra. Just don’t listen to them while driving or after you’ve put something in the oven or on the stove. 

KNOW THAT YOU’RE NOT ALONE IF DECEMBER FAILS TO DELIGHT YOU

Are you looking at the month ahead and feeling let down? Maybe you’ve recently moved, broken up, or moved across the country from your family? Perhaps you recently graduated and this is your first year on the job, so you don’t have a social circle yet? Or, worse, maybe you’ve suffered a loss in the past year and you’re not up to celebrating.

As a society, we put so much emphasis on the spectacle of the holidays that it’s hard to know what to do with yourself when it seems like everyone else is having a better time than you. If you don’t celebrate the December holidays, or just aren’t feeling up to it this year, you may want to consider organizing your month in a number of alternative ways:

• Get a head start on your 2024 goals or resolutions. There’s no reason you have to wait until the calendar flips to commit to something requiring your attention and focus. If you plan now, you’ll be miles ahead of everyone else on January 1st!
• Volunteer. Many agencies and programs have difficulty finding volunteers during the holidays because individuals who usually help are overwhelmed with other obligations. AARP has a great Create the Good volunteer search page. Just type in the type of volunteering you’d like to do and/or your zip code, and it will provide a list of options. Whether you want to be care for animals, cuddle newborns, or support those less fortunate, you may be surprised how much you can boost your mood by feeling a new sense of purpose.
• Explore your community as a tourist. So much of the year, we spend rushing to get to and from work and through our other tasks. Use your downtime in December to see where you live with new eyes. Check out Wanderlush‘s How to Be a Tourist in Your Own City: 12 Easy & Creative Tips.
• Organize! December is a stellar time to put on some music (and no, it doesn’t have to be holiday music — Weird Al Yankovic is always a good option) and pick a closet or cabinet to purge and downsize. Donate what doesn’t serve you and know that it’ll be a blessing to someone else.
• Get some fresh air without feeling like you have to rush anywhere in particular. 
• Start in on that self-care I was talking about!
• Get support. It’s much more typical (let’s not say “normal” — that’s just a setting on the washing machine) to feel let down or lonely during the holidays. Reach out to friends and family, or to a mental health professional whose whole professional purpose is to have the expertise to show you how talking about your feelings can be therapeutic. (If you or someone is struggling and in need, there are also peer-run warmlines and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. 

FOR MORE DECEMBER GUIDANCE

If you’re tired of the holidays making you feel like you’re taffy being pulled in several different directions, check out my ebook, Simplify the Season and Save Your Sanity.

Have a wonderful December!