I’ve struggled a bit with this ezine trying to put my thoughts into words. How do you talk about something that has so many sides to it like holidays? This time of year can be a lot of fun but it can also be filled with huge amounts of stress.

With the holidays fast approaching (I mean they are on us now) things start to really heat up and move pretty quickly. If we’re not really careful we can get into that “doing mode” and believe performance is all that really counts.

You know the get it done, keep going, get more done, kind of thing.

To help me with this article today, I went to dictionary.com to get a general definition of holiday:

1. A day free from work that one may spend at pleasure, especially a day on which custom or the law dictates a halting of general business activity to commemorate or celebrate a particular event.
2. a religious feast day, a holy day.
3. Chiefly British, A vacation. Often used in the phrase on holiday

It seems that the first two definitions are really appropriate for many of us during this time in Western Culture. There are a number of holidays celebrated during December that fall into the “day of leisure…a halting of general business activity to commemorate or celebrate a particular event” as well as falling into the “holy day” category.

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It can be really tough sometimes making transitions from one mind set to another, especially when we need to make those transitions around time. Starting and stopping one activity and moving into another can be difficult, but sometimes nothing seems tougher than stopping work and coming back to it after a holiday.

We call this problem time management. But you know the more I work with my own time and coach others to work with theirs the more I realize that it isn’t about managing time. Time can’t be managed. It just keeps going on doing its thing….march march march…

What we can do is make some real decisions about what to do with our time. That’s the only thing we really have control over.

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