Some women seem to have it all together at the holiday season, reaching the holidays having calmly done everything they needed to, prepared everything, and ready to truly enjoy the celebration. Are those women especially gifted? No, they just have better time management skills than most. In particular, they:  

Plan ahead
Taking a few moments to plan now for the holidays, from work load to gifts to dinners, makes execution a breeze. There is a saying in time management that 1 minutes of preparation saves 10 minutes of implementation. It’s very true.
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Are organized
Because every minute spent looking for something is a minute that isn’t available for something more important - such as relaxing! So smart women have their stuff organized, but also their tasks. It takes too much brainpower to remember everything on a gift list, for instance, and having it ready for use in your purse reduces the chances of buying two gifts for the same person or going over budget.
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Know what shortcuts to take, and take them
There are many shortcuts to a successful holiday (for instance, buy the Christmas plum pudding, then tailor it to your tastes, rather than making it from scratch). By looking for every possible shortcut that doesn’t significantly affect the result, smart women often save up to half of the prep time for the holidays. ?

Know how to get as much done ahead of time as possible, both at work and at home, so that they can actually enjoy themselves
If everything that can be done ahead of time is done before the end of year time crunch, there is no longer a time crunch, since a significant part of the work, at work and at home, is already done. ?

Know how to master their stress and deal with their emotions, so that on D-Day they are all smiles
No matter how much planning one does, and how organized one is, stressful moments will happen. Smart women have stress relief techniques, such as deep breathing and emotional release techniques such as EFT that make all the difference in those unavoidable stress moments.  

Know how to delegate as much as possible.
It is usually possible to delegate a lot more than we think, and a lot more help is available than we realize. Smart women know this, and look to delegate every possible task to someone else, be it an assistant, their children, family members or hired help. Sometimes, the cost of hiring someone is more than offset by the time savings that result. ?

How many of those Smart Woman skills do you already have? All six? Congratulations! Less than six? No worries, there are many ways to learn them. Most effective, I have found, is to either hire a specialist to help you develop them, or use a program tailored to the season, such as Holiday Delight  

The phone rings. Immediately, no matter what you are doing, you stop, pick up the phone and answer? only to find out that it was a telemarketer. You know that a call at that time has every chance of being unimportant, yet it seems impossible to resist picking up the phone when it rings.  

Why is that?  

It's because of a small part of your brain, called the reptilian brain, or primitive brain, that we have in common with most animals. The primitive brain's function is to keep you alive, both by taking care of all the automatic functions you need to live, such as heart beat and breathing, but also to keep you alive in the face of danger. As part of this latter task, it assesses any unexpected element in your environment and triggers the fight-or-flight response when it deems it necessary.  

Here's the rub, though: this part of your brain doesn't think, it just reacts instinctively.  

Until the very recent past (think the pioneers crossing the Rockies toward the West Coast, for instance), unexpected sounds and movements were usually a sign of immediate danger, such as a bear about to pounce on you. So your primitive brain learned to react to every sound or movement as if it was a potential danger, forcing you to stop what you are doing, assess the danger, then resume your task if it was a false alarm.  

Today, an unexpected sound or movement is much more likely to be the phone ringing or an email arriving in your mailbox than an oncoming bear, or even a car barreling towards you. Yet your primitive brain doesn't make the difference between true danger to your life and the phone! So every single time the phone rings, it triggers its alert system, makes you pay attention and assess the danger, if any.  

Add to this alter system some cultural and psychological elements such as the fact that until voicemail boxes, it was the rule to answer the phone every time it rang, because you could miss something important; or the fact that it makes us feel wanted or important when someone calls; and you have a recipe to make it extremely difficult not to pick up the phone when it rings.  

Yet this has a huge cost, as any of you who is constantly interrupted by calls and emails can attest? It's distracting, slows you down, and sometimes even gets your adrenalin going for no reason whatsoever. So turn off the phone every once in a while to get what you need to done, knowing that any important call will result in a voicemail!  

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin

PS: If you're not sure how to master all your interruptions, either email me or click here  to see Daily Mastery's teleclass Eradicate Your Interruptions  . It gives you strategies to "cheat" your primitive brain into not reacting unnecessarily to sounds and movements, and to minimize your interruptions to you can be more focused and have more time.

In the past few weeks, I made an amazing discovery on how to give yourself more energy and hence be more productive (yes, I'm still learning about optimal productivity, and probably will until the day I die. ?).  

I thought, like most people, that, as long as you had a reasonably healthy diet, you were ok. Your energy pattern throughout the day is your energy pattern, and there's not much you can do to change it.  

I have weight to release, and I decided that now was the time. I had tried other diets in the past (only the reasonably healthy ones, no pineapple juice diet for me!), but they didn't work. The only one that had really worked for me was a diet based on body type that I had done in my early 20's, with great success, and that had allowed to keep me the weight off for over 6 years (then I got married and had a child? What can I say? I'm a stress eater). It was more of a way of eating for life than a diet, and I liked the premise.  

So I decided to get back on that diet, and see what would happen. Boy, was I in for a surprise! Not only did I start to lose weight, my primary goal, but my energy levels completely changed, in a way that had never happened in the other diets I tried, and within the first week. Before, I had pronounced peaks and valleys of energy throughout the day, with a dreaded 2-to-4 low during which I wasn't good at much. But suddenly I was in a state where my body had steady energy throughout the day, and the 2-to-4 low was barely noticeable!  

And my output every day has increased accordingly. I'm not exactly unproductive when I sit at my desk to work, but now I can sustain my pace for much longer periods of time.  

My lesson in all this?  

What we put in our mouths can make a drastic difference not only on our weight, but across the board, since it affects our physical energy throughout the day ? and the same food affects different people differently. For instance, if I eat bread or cereal for breakfast, I want to eat all day long, while a friend of mine finds it's the food that keeps her going all morning. My favorite breakfast of apple sauce and plain yogurt, which sustains me all morning, leaves her hungry after an hour. So if you want to increase your energy easily, start paying attention to the effect different foods have on you. After eating a certain food, do you start to crave sweets, either immediately or a couple of hours later? Does it make you feel heavy right after? Does it make you tired? Does it make you energetic? And if you don't want to do all this detective work, here is the system I use: Dr. Abravanel's Body Types  

Give it a try: watch what you eat, the effect of foods on your body, and you’ll see for yourself...

Child care, especially occasional emergency child care, is one of the things that takes a huge amount of time  and stress in a mother's life. I know, it used to be the case for me too?  

You see, I have a six-year-old, never had a regular, my husband works full-time at a job he can't leave or easily do from home, and our families live in Ohio, California and Europe - while we live in New York City. Oh, and did I mention that for several years we couldn't afford to have a regular babysitter?

So over the years I had to develop some pretty creative solutions? They became
:  

?Always have a backup plan, and if possible the backup for the backup
?Befriend carefully chosen mothers - I know it sounds callous, but I’ve genuinely become friends with them...
?Have a break-week rotation
?Join a babysitting coop

The Backup Plan:
In everything I ever created and developed, I always tried to include a backup plan, so that if my Plan A didn't work, I immediately had Plan B, and possibly Plan C, to fall back on. The key, though, is to develop the backup plans ahead of time, so that you already have them when you need them (for instance, have the number of a last-minute babysitting service if all else fails). It's served me very well  - I think only once did I find myself stranded, because all three of my plans fell through at the same time ? and it's also served my clients very well. Having the backup plan ready saves A LOT of time and stress when Little One suddenly spikes a fever at 7:30 am.  

Team Up With Another Mom:
One of the best things I ever did was befriending the mom of another child in my son's preschool class, S. We both were in similar situations, so I offered a babysitting exchange.  I would take her child from 4 to 7 one day a week, and she would take both another day. To be honest with you, it was a very selfish act on my part: I desperately needed some Me Time?

Over time, we also became each other's backups: If S's daughter is sick and she has to teach (she's a professor), and I can, I keep her with me. On the other hand, if my son is sick and S has an office day, she takes him. And when we get a last-minute 1pm school dismissal announcement, chances are one of us is available to pick up both children and keep them until the other one is free again. Today, we are excellent friends, and have in some ways re-created a family of choice, where we can drop each other's child whenever we need to.  

The Vacation Rotation:
It works wonders for all those weeks off that the kinds get between September and June. Here is how it works: Get together a group of 5 mothers (somehow it's always mothers ?) who work full- or part-time, and offer that you make a rotation, where every mom takes care of all 5 children one day, then has the other four days available to work. They will LOVE you for suggesting it, and will take you up on your offer. Make sure to have more than 5 mothers in your pool, because there is always one or too away for the week, and you want to make sure the full week is covered.
This is a free solution for the kids to be taken care of and entertained, while you can still work 4 out of the 5 days, instead of having to use your precious vacation time. In my experience, it works beautifully for most breaks, except for Christmas and Summer ? but you already guessed that.  

The Babysitting Coop:
In many communities, moms have started to get together and pool themselves into a babysitting coop. It's pretty simple: Whenever you need someone to babysit your child, you send an email to everyone, and whoever can will respond and take care of your child. In the process, you are "spending" ccop hours, and the person who babysits is "earning" coop hours. I was briefly part of one, and it allowed my husband and I to go out every once in a while without breaking the bank, and my baby to be taken care of a few times when I had to go see clients.  

What about you? What creative solutions did you or are you using?  

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin
www.dailymastery.com

Wow! What an amazing response to my last post on boundaries. By popular demand, here is Boundaries part 2: Keeping your boundaries with friends (and family).  

But before I start, thank you so much to all of you who took the time to wish me a happy birthday last week. I was really touched by your messages.  

Keeping your boundaries with friends and family is probably one of the most difficult things to do:  Our natural wish to support those we love combines with the way we women are raised to serve others to make it all too easy to go too far and hurt ourselves in the process.  

Remember that you cannot help others if you haven't taken care of yourself first: On planes, the safety instructions tell you to put your oxygen mask on BEFORE helping anyone else, including your children. There's a reason for it: if you help others first, chances are you won't have enough energy left to put your own mask on afterwards, and will lose consciousness and/or die. On the other hand, once you have your mask on, you can keep helping others for as long as they need it.  

It's the same with our energy: If we have a steady supply of it (i.e. if we take care of ourselves), then we can help people forever; but if we help people first, there's often not enough energy to take care of ourselves, and that's when illnesses, fatigue, the blues, and burnout set in.

This being said, how do you do to make sure you don't let yourself get depleted by your friends and family?  

-First identify those people who suck the life force out of you. If you pay attention to how you feel, you'll find that some people drain you: every time you interact with them, you feel most tired/sad/angry than you were before ? I call them the energy vampires. Other people, on the other hand, leave you feeling refreshed, happy, more positive ? they are your battery-replenishers. Keep the latter, and try to avoid the former as much as possible. When I started eliminating the energy vampires from my life, I saw a huge difference in my energy and happiness!  

-What about the people you can't eliminate from your life (family, for instance)? Place specific boundaries with them: see them less often; see them only with other people present. To give you a personal example, I had issues with a close family member for a long time, someone who was very cutting, critical and mean to me when we were in private (i.e. just him, his wife and me). So I did two things: I limited the number of times I would see him to once every two months at most, and our meetings always involved friends or other family members. This gave me the space I needed to stop being hurt, and eventually heal myself.  

-Find out who among your friends just ask from you, and never give back. It may be the friend who's always asking for a favor, but when you need help, is never there. Or the neighbor who conveniently always shows up at 6 pm, right when you're about to sit down for dinner, and you always invite him or her. Just start to say no to their requests, nicely but firmly. Remember, "no" is a full sentence, and doesn't need any embellishment, excuse or explanation.  

-Start setting time for you, and keep this time as sacred, not to be disturbed no matter what. You wouldn't even think of canceling an appointment with a friend to see another one (unless there is an emergency). Why do you do it when the appointment is with yourself? Start treating yourself the way you treat your best friend?  

Let me know how these steps work for you! Next post, I'll look at boundaries at work, another potential hornets nest?  

Karin

As women, we often have trouble establishing and keeping boundaries, both at work and at home. Yet, not doing so exposes us to a lot of lost time and, often, to being used and exploited, which makes us feel stressed, which in turns makes us less productive, and very soon we're in a negative pit of overwhelm, stress and frustration.  

Jennifer (not her real name) had serious boundary issues both at work and in life. In particular, a client that was supposed to take no more than 20 hours of her week ended up asking for urgent tasks at all times of day, interrupting her and, in the end, getting much more time than they paid for. As a result, Jennifer was working a solid 60-hour week.  

One of the first things we did when we started working together was putting boundaries around this client: she would contact them and let them know that, due to her workload, she had to change the way she worked with them; from now on her time would be completely devoted to them between 9 and 1 every day, but that any task they sent after 1 pm would be fulfilled the next day.  

Jennifer was afraid that her client would be very unhappy with the change, but she was so desperate for a solution that she agreed to make the call. To her surprise (but not mine, because things usually go this way), her client immediately agreed and, after a few misses, respected her new boundaries. And Jennifer discovered that, with this new scheme in place, she worked better and faster (this change alone reduced her workweek by almost 10 hours) and her client respected her more than before.  

Jennifer, in her difficulty to establish boundaries with her client, is far from an exception. Most of us are guilty of it in one form or another. So where do you not establish boundaries, or, once establish, do you let people breach them over and over again? Is it because you feel you can't say no to your boss? Or you feel guilty to establish firm boundaries with your child, because you see him or her so little in the first place? Is it something else? How much is not establishing or having your boundaries respected really hurting you? My guess is that, just like Jennifer, it is costing you dearly in terms of stress, lack of time and feeling out of control. So start re-establishing your boundaries. If it feels strange, try with small things, before graduating to larger ones, such as occasionally saying no to your boss. You will find that your life suddenly gets much more peaceful and productive.  

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin