It’s that time of year again – where did all the days and months go?

Downtime is super-important, and the festive season is a great time to take a break.

As I know all too well from bitter personal experience, not taking time out eventually leads to burnout and misery. Not good. I wrote an in-depth article on this, so if you’d like to check it out it’s here: “Stop and Recharge”

So, we all need to stop and relax.

We also need to take stock and review, and we need to make plans. There’s a lot of pressure to do it all.

May I humbly suggest a strategy to take back control of your holidays and relaxation?

You could try to:

• Plan every second of your break in minute detail and police it ruthlessly.
• Drift through it and maybe get things done as and when.
• You could try to front or backload your efforts to cram everything in.

To be honest, I’ve tried all these approaches at some point and none of them really work for me.

I now use a very powerful technique to sustainably achieve everything I need to achieve without sacrificing any of the benefits of proper downtime.

The technique is controlled time-blocking.

Let’s say that you have 14 days off over the festive season.

I’m a fan of reviewing and learning from experiences – that’s what effective self-developers do – so I set aside a block of time to do this. I block out two consecutive full days them out at the start of the break. I work from 0800 to 1630hrs and review my entire year’s output. I draw mind maps but you’re of course free to do whatever works best for you.

Then I block out the last two days of the break to make my plans for the coming year. Same deal as before.

I then have the middle ten days fully to myself, my family and my friends. No excuses, no backsliding, no stressing about work.

Proper relaxing downtime is created when you are fully in the moment with no distractions. If you’ve allocated the time to do what you need to do, then you’re golden. The rest is 100% free time.

The trick for me to get the best from my relaxation time is to be fully and mindfully present. Not dwelling on the past and not thinking about the future.

That’s why my present to myself every Christmas is to be fully present and in control of how I allocate my precious time.

How about you?

P.S. If you do go down the New Years’ Resolution route (or know others who do) here’s an article of mine with some thoughts on this as well as 5 great tips for making resolutions which may actually work - “New Year Resolutions - 5 Sticky Tips”   

Have a great festive break and a very happy and highly self-developmental New Year. 

All the very best to you and yours 

Andrew D Pope.