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Productivity during the holidays - is it possible?


Joshua Zerkel

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It's hard for me to believe it, but a Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season is almost here. For many of us, productivity tends to plummet during the last month or so of the year, as we're often distracted and busy.

I have a few projects that I'm focusing on wrapping up before the end of 2011, and scheduling chunks of those over the next few weeks is how I'm going to stay on track.

How do you plan on keeping your productivity up during the final six weeks of 2011?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Couple thoughts on this...

In past lives (not necessarily here at Evernote, I've yet to experience it anyway) I've noticed that work productivity tends to drop not because of reduced work hours or time spent, but as a function of all the various actors that take off during the holidays. Work is rarely a solo-affair, and tends to be entangled with other employees. So progress tends to slow down because everyone's working around or waiting on everyone's different holiday schedules. I'm not sure how you can get around that pitfall, unless you do some pretty rigorous planning with everyone upfront.

Tangentially, I think personal productivity (home projects and the like) may be enhanced by all of this holiday time off. If you work at a business that has a "use-it-or-lose-it" PTO policy, you're going to end up backloading your time off, which hopefully would give you time to complete some of those lingering 2011 items. That is, if you're productive with your time off :wacko:

Personally, I'm going to finish filling a gigantic hole in my backyard and prepping it to become a koi pond for when I start implementing some aquaculture plans in the spring. It originally held 10,000 gallons of water, which, when accidentally broken (at night, who the hell do you call? NO ONE) last year flooded my alley-way and a half mile of road.

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Great observations! One thing I've noticed as well is that professional productivity sometimes drops this time of year almost by default, as I think many people are a bit overwhelmed and tired with their personal lives and their work lives take a backburner (which is in contrast to most of the rest of the year, when work is generally the priority).

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