Your Holiday Business Survival Guide

Are you pulling your hair out yet this holiday season? Just looking at my instagram and twitter feeds and listening to my clients, there’s a whole lot of burnout happening.

I’m sharing a few tips to help make this holiday season a bit less stressful so you can focus on what’s really most important.

1. What do you NEED to get done? I know, you feel like you have to do EVERYTHING before the clock strikes midnight for the holidays, right? There’s actually NO magic in the new year. It’s not an actual deadline. Figure out the things that you must do and figure out which of the things on your to do list can be scheduled for sometime after the holiday? The upside to this is that you might actually feel more creative, more available, and feel like you have more excitement around the project if you take a break.
2. Have “client days off” and “business is closed” days. Here’s what I mean. As a business owner, you really wear two hats. You’re first the person who services your clients. You take care of creating your products, delivering the consulting strategy, sending out the goods you’ve made. There’s also the part of the house that you don’t get to work in very often – the fun creative projects that really move the needle forward in your business. On your “client days off,” think of this as a business care day. You’ll get to do projects that are fun for you (not to say your client projects aren’t really fun), you get to dream about your business and scheme on all the things you want to be doing. What days will you schedule for your “client days off” and how often will those happen? The key here is that you don’t schedule over them with other things (namely client projects).
3. Know what exactly you do, the impact you have, and your vision for your business. This seems like an odd one, right? What I mean by this is, what will you say to Aunt Sally when she asks you why you quit your awesome ($$$) job to start your own business. If you’re feeling good about what you’re up to, even if it’s the mission of your work and who you’re serving, you’ll feel more likely to be confident and less like she can deflate your ego and ruin your holiday! (Take that, Aunt Sally!)
4. Deliver the projects that you can before the holiday. You want as much of your plate clean and clear before you leave your work. You don’t want to have to think about clients or what they might be demanding of you and how you can change something.
5. Set an out of office email. A client might email. Your attorney might email. No matter. If you set the expectation that you’re closed for the holidays, people will have to respect that. How much clearer are those boundaries when you set your out of office email? Take it a step further and turn off your phone notifications for your emails. On the iPhone, you can turn off your email in Settings. You don’t have to delete it off of your phone, just turn it off so you don’t see the emails rolling in as you’re enjoying a nice glass of wine by the fire.