Working from home is wonderful for the most part and usually can be navigated smoothly through most of the year. However, when certain holidays come around, it can become a challenge in getting your work completed and meeting deadlines due to family activities and distractions. Obviously, some holidays are simply meant for families to spend together if it’s at all possible, but your work may not stop just because the holidays are in full force.
One thing that you can try to do is start planning for the holidays a significant amount of weeks ahead of time. If you can get everything done that needs to be taken care of before the end of the year, you can warn your clients or customers that you’re going to be off during a particular time frame. Anyone that is ugly to you about it might be someone that you need to reconsider keeping as a client or customer.
When you’re able to take, for instance, a full week off at Christmas, it takes a lot of pressure off of you and allows you to do such things as gift shopping, decorating, cleaning the house, and cooking. That’s why this is the preferred way of dealing with the holidays. You’re also able to sit and relax with the rest of your family and guests.
If you simply cannot manage time off, at least try to get the holiday itself off. Do you really want to be eating your Thanksgiving dinner alone in your office at your computer? Will you really find it fun to have your stack of Christmas gifts brought to you in your office on Christmas morning while you’re checking on the progress of something? Neither of those things sounds like a lot of fun. So if you can’t get more time away from your work, at least take off the holiday.
Another way to handle the situation of holidays is to let someone else do the work this year. This is especially true when you’re the one that does all of the cooking, cleaning, and decorating every year. Turn it over to your family and let them take over. Your husband and sons can cook around their football games. There’s no need for you to always be the one that waits on every one. Just sit everyone down and explain to them that you’ve got to work this year and you won’t have time to do everything you’ve always done.
A last resort is to simply go out on the holidays. Plenty of restaurants offer high quality buffets on Thanksgiving Day and at Christmas. These can be great stress relievers because no one has to have all of the cooking and entertaining duties all on one person. Invite other family members to join you and everyone can have an enjoyable time. If you can take an extra day off, there are also lots of nice hotels that offer holiday discounts to people that want to extend their holiday fun beyond a great meal.
There are so many things you can do to ensure that both you and your family enjoy the holidays even though you’re working from home now.
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