Top Ten Ways to Slow Down This Holiday Season

Did you survive Black Friday and the shopping crowds over the weekend? Are you stressing about the holiday season? Do you have more things on your “to-do” list than there is time for in the day? Well, this post is for you! Christine Louise Hohlbaum has some ideas of how we can survive the holiday “rush” and actually slow down enough to enjoy everything wonderful about the Christmas Season and keep your your sanity.

Top Ten Ways to Slow Down This Holiday Season:

1.) Establish gadget-free spaces. In our hyper-connected world, our gadgets sometimes take precedence over the people in our lives. While now is all we really have, you needn’t spend every second of it in your online universe.

2.) Reduce the immediacy of your communication by actually writing a letter of thanks to someone instead of an email. The person will appreciate your efforts and the time it took for you to send the note.

3.) Busy is a mind-set. Remember that activity does not equal productivity. Taking time to think is as valuable as implementing the idea itself.

4.) Disengage from clock combat. Spend a day without wearing or watch or access to the time.

5.) Avoid holiday meltdowns by managing expectations. When you communicate effectively, you avert possible upsets before they happen.

6) Treat your food intake as your primary activity, not as a secondary one as you do something else (such as read or watch TV).

7.) Identify potentially hazardous behaviors such as texting while driving. Turn off your cell phone in the car.

8.) Learn to say no with kindness. When you do so, you are truly saying yes to yourself.

9.) Slay the inner pig-dog, a mythical, procrastinating creature (called Schweinehund in German) that tells you now is never a good idea.

10.) Embrace time abundance, a notion of having more than enough time to do what is required to fulfill your ultimate purpose.

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Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World, lives near Munich, Germany with her husband and two children. She occasionally takes on small TV and film roles to satisfy her inner thespian. Her book-related blog, http://PowerofSlow.org, was recently nominated for Blog of the Year 2009 by the Stevie Awards for Women in Business.