Peace of Mind Organizing

Streamlining the holidays

6 November 2008

The election’s behind us and now it’s time to focus on the next big thing: the holidays.

Personally, I’m minimalist when it comes to the December holidays. No decorating. Very little gift buying. Yet I still feel a bit of stress, primarily over my holiday cards. As I’ve posted about before, I send out several hundred cards, each with a personalized note. So it takes awhile. And I’d better get started. There are a number of steps to this project:

• Decide what card to send (I usually do two: one business, one personal)
• Finalize the recipient list
• Consolidate the addresses into Mac Address Book (a one-time, if time-consuming project)
• Order cards
• Print out labels
• Inventory stamps to see if more need to be purchased
• Purchase stamps if necessary
• Write a newsletter for personal cards
• Order paper to print newsletter on
• Print newsletter
• Put labels on envelopes
• Write notes in each card
• Mail cards

This little project is a great example of breaking down projects into tasks. Putting “work on holiday cards” on my to-do list isn’t as effective as writing down a specific task. What I need to do is sit down with my calendar and write a deadline for each task (I’m all about the deadlines). I’ll do that by working backwards: selecting a deadline by which I must mail all the cards. Something tells me that the deadline for the first task of deciding about cards will be just around the corner!

One thing I might consider is ways to streamline the project. The steps above are very familiar; I do them every year. But maybe I need to do something completely different. Perhaps I’ll use only one card, rather than two. Perhaps I’ll consider sending electronic greetings instead (I seriously doubt that). Maybe I’ll make a decision to cut back on the number of cards I send and set some sort of criteria for staying on my card list. By doing that, I would save money and effort. But I’d also reach out to fewer people.

My point is this: it’s always a good idea to think about doing things differently. In these tough economic times, streamlining what we do for the holidays might a lot of sense. And anything that reduces stress is a plus. So, based on this little exploration, I’m adding a new task to the very top of my task list for the holiday card project:

• Explore other options/alternatives for holiday cards.

Tomorrow I’ll write more about organizing for the holidays.

Tagged with: cards, holidays, stress

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