How I am getting things done on Christmas projects

TL/DR version: make a short list, break tasks down, prioritize, be gentle with yourself

Full version:

My company has a holiday shutdown at the end of the year, and I usually take enough vacation so I get a two week break – nice! In the past, I have tried to take advantage of this time to do lots of things, but ended up not completing a lot. This year, I decided to change how I approached this opportunity:

Step 1: Make a short list of projects to accomplish

After reviewing the things I might want to do, I settled on two large tasks that I had not made any progress on in the last month. One was a writing project to document the tools and processes I used to create and publish the Portland Protest News website. I had an outline that was several months old, but had not made time to get this done. The second task was starting to read How to Engineer Software by Steve Tockey. I had watched some videos of him talking about the use of semantic modeling, and was intrigued enough to buy his 1100-page book. However, it has been sitting on my desk for almost a month, and I had only opened it once.

Step 2: Break tasks down

For the writing task, I decided to go for a daily word count of 500 words per day, following Jeff Goins’ Three Bucket System for starting a writing habit. For the reading task, I set a goal of one chapter a day. With these constraints, I hoped that I could fit these in around holiday activities and still feel a sense of accomplishment.

Step 3: Prioritize

I worked to try to do these as soon as possible each day. That did not always work, but knowing that these were my most important items to get done helped me to maintain focus.

Step 4: Be gentle with yourself

If there was a day where I did not get both tasks done (or maybe none!), I decided that was going to be ok. After all, this was a vacation, not a job!

Results:

I have completed my first week of vacation, and managed to write at least 500 words each day. I completed 5 chapters in the book, so there were two days I did not complete my reading task. But that’s ok! I feel good about what I have gotten done, and managed to fit in a few more things (like this blog post).

I hope this is helpful – let me know what you think about my method!