by Karin Stewart

Created on: September 18, 2009   Last Updated: September 22, 2009

The best way to manage holiday stress? It's to avoid it in the first place, as this story shows.

For one of my clients, the second half of the year was an increasingly stressful and unhappy time. A successful salesperson, during the first half of the year, she felt like she had all the time in the world. She made plans, followed up on them or not. Then the summer came, time when her business slowed down and she took time off. However, by the end of August, things started to heat up. She would look at her goals and find that she needed to work more to reach them; she would work and work, time would creep up on her and suddenly it was a week before Thanksgiving, and she hadn't even started to think about Christmas.

From then on, pure, outright stress set in, and she lived in survival mode until the end of the year. She would end up meeting her yearly goals, have a beautiful Christmas dinner and New Year's Eve, but at what cost! She reached January 1 exhausted, physically and mentally, desperate for a long vacation that she couldn't take.

She had simply had enough of this yearly ritual, wanted it to change and so came to me. After fine-tuning her daily routines, I suggested to her a very radical idea: Start working on every major deadline, project or event four months ahead of time. So in mid-August, we started planning her holiday season. We set what appeared to the people around her as ridiculously early deadlines for her different end-of-year tasks, such end of August for her business holiday cards text and the choice of client gifts, or mid-September to order her customized cards.

However, when October rolled in, her colleagues had stopped laughing: most of her preparations were already done, and she could fully devote herself to beating her sales goals. Her holiday cards were there, stamped and ready to be mailed on December 1; the menu and decoration for her Christmas dinner were already chosen, the non-perishable elements already bought, the rest ordered or scheduled for order; most of her gifts were already bought. All she had left to do was follow the rest of her plan, with of the work already done.

On the January 2 following this breakthrough year, she emailed me: This is the most amazing end of year I've ever had. No stress, no running, no rushing, no wondering how I would pull it off. Not only was I relaxed and did I enjoy myself the whole time, but I had time to take on things as the opportunities presented themselves. I've NEVER been able to take advantage of a last-minute opportunity before if it came to me in the last quarter of the year! Oh, and my friends are asking what I did to be so calm, they don't even recognize me.

Since then, she's been planning everything at least four months ahead, and is loving it just as much as she loved this very first peacefully productive Christmas season. She found out that planning ahead, by removing most of the stress associated with looming deadlines, makes her more productive, and it shows in her results.

To get the same results my client did, start planning well ahead of time. If this feels too daunting to do on your own, search for "holiday survival", "avoid end of year stress", or "holiday delight". You'll find good resources to help you get started right away.

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