If Everything Is Important, Nothing Is Important

Some timely holiday season coaching:

BLUF: For some of us, a component of holiday  stress comes from trying to squeeze everything in the Important/Urgent quadrant.
 Some practical tips
1)    Be brutally honest building your 2×2 Important/Urgent matrix.
2)    Ask the question: what happens if I delay doing this task (or just dump it entirely)?
3)    Is the need to be perfect the sign of a limiting belief?
4)    Are you able to leverage the character strength of forgiveness  by aiming it inwardly?

This is an update post of something I originally put up on LinkedIn during the holiday season 2023. The nice thing about the holidays coming every year is that they bring some predictable issues with them. Kids from the 1980’s (like me) would point out that knowing is half the battle. Forewarned is forearmed. The first step is admitting you have a problem. You know the routine. This post relays the particulars of a coaching session I had with a respected colleague about time management and prioritization around the holidays. It was well received, and i think my plan (for now…everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face) is to update and iterate on the post every year before the holidays.

Coaching is quite a bit about being curious. Helping a client gain insight and turn it into action typically starts with questions that a 4 year old might ask…why? Why? WHY? The mindset of a child is a good one to remember; they haven’t yet acquired all the baggage we have that brings limiting beliefs. This mindset worked very well in this coaching session, and i pass it on for that reason. The holidays are a repetitive emotionally fraught time of year. Nearly all of us will have some hang up, anticipatory nausea or limiting belief based on our holiday experiences…these little cogitive-emotional gremlins are just waiting to celebrate the most wonderful time of year. It’s during the holidays that they have free rein to narrow our perspective, limit our creativity/flexibility and generally drive us to a self fulfilling prophecy of our own m insert and stress.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and my session from 2023 caused all kind of lightbulbs of insight lighting up. A little more context and a side note: the best coaching sessions are the ones where both client and coach walk away with surprising insights. Not surprisingly the session started out pretty mundane: time management, task completion, and prioritization.  There was stress on the table (no surprise) about a list of “to-dos” related to work & business and competition from family responsibilities particularly around the holidays.

Shouldn’t work automagically be the top priority? I’m a firm believer that compartmentalization is largely arbitrary and artificial, or at least more than we realize when separating business and personal domains. They have a huge piece in common: you. With that in mind, the conversation led toward a more holistic approach to populating the standard Eisenhower 2×2 matrix of important/nonimportant vs urgent/nonurgent. 

The answer to the question “What happens if you ship that product now?” was “Nothing bad. It’s a brand new collaborative with the client and it needs client input at this point anyhow”.  Often, the pursuit of perfection is a limiting belief in action. Dispense with it, and you may realize that something on the to-do list is actually on the “done” list. This idea isn’t limited to work related tasks. It could be anything else you would prioritize highly during the rest of the year…reevaluate prioritization during the holidays. Simply asking a new question could be helpful; the answer may jog you to an insight and lead to an action you wouldn’t otherwise have considered.

Once this work task related stressor was out of the way, an additional insight popped up: Holidays are important to my client, & so is family. They enjoy family relationships thru traditions, and passing those values and traditions to their children, nieces and nephews. That sounds important, doesn’t it?

If the holidays and family are important to you, then by default they go “important/urgent” during this time of year. Rather than stress at something you can’t change (the calendar) or won’t change (core values), try reframing and reevaluating other things. They may be done already, or may be able to be dealt with after the New Year, or worked on slowly over the next several weeks during the “in-between” times. The holidays aren’t the problem: thinking everything is equally important is the problem. That is the literal (and I mean literally literal, not the way the kids do nowadays) opposite of prioritizing. 

I’m keeping this one short on purpose! Time is limited in life, and seemingly more so in the holiday season. The sooner you get done with the is post, the sooner you can reframe and get on with your day. If you can spare a moment, I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

What are your time management, prioritization and stress management hacks for the holidays? Share them in the comments – let’s make holiday stress management our annual gift to the Functional Mentoring community!