Managing the Tightrope of Success Over the Holidays

Emily Luijbregts, PMP, is a project manager in Breda, Netherlands.

  Career Development  

Diwali. Thanksgiving. Client go live. Yearly performance review. Black Friday. Christmas. School holiday productions. Family politics. It all takes energy and effort.

In the last quarter of the year, the pressure builds and mounts—work, life and family. It’s all stress. How can you keep your sanity and manage the next month without becoming a ball of stress—thus making everything completely and entirely unmanageable?

I want you to try something right now: Think of your entire day as a cup. All of the energy that you have for the day is filled in that cup.

Now, think about every single thing that you need to accomplish today: work meetings, exercise, children’s activities, seeing friends, etc. Some of those things will take more energy than others.

Each of your activities will take something from your cup. Some days, you’ll have something left in it; other days, there will be nothing. Over the holiday season, you will likely experience more days when there is nothing left in your cup (and maybe even a hole starts to form at the bottom).

To stop this from causing bigger long-term issues, you need to look at what you can do to resolve it—especially as more companies and countries are returning to remote work as winter draws near and COVID cases are on the rise.

One thing that I have learned (the hard way—from making many …

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