51. How to Rest and Still Get Things Done: A Holiday Survival Guide
Episode 51
If you think rest and productivity are opposites, you’re in for a surprise. In today’s episode, we talk about how rest FUELS productivity, and how the two go hand-in-hand.
Learn how to recharge in micro-moments, find the kind of rest that works for YOU, and keep your productivity momentum going without burning out. It’s your ultimate plan to stay energized and still get things done during a busy holiday season.
🎙️Other Episodes Mentioned
Episode 10 → Tips for Better Task Management and Focus (Q&A)
Episode 24 → How to Focus Better: Tips for School, Work and ADHD
Episode 36 → How to Stop Procrastinating
Episode 43 → How to Focus When You’re Working From Home
✅Enroll in SchoolHabits University (Curious? Check it out!)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them 😉
51 How to Rest and Still Get Things Done[00:00:00]
Hello, and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. And this is episode 51. And as I say that I am reminded that we are getting so close to the one year anniversary of the creation of this podcast.
Episode number one came out on January 4th, 2024. And I've been going strong since then.
I have some terrific episodes planned for the rest of the year. And then starting in January, 2025 I am excited to share that I will be bringing some experts onto the show.
That's right. Starting in January, I'll be doing interview episodes with industry experts who can shed light on the topics that we talk about here on the show. And that I think will be valuable for listeners to hear some new voices and new perspectives on some of the things that we talk about here.
So stay tuned because my very first interview will be coming out at the beginning of January and it's going to be a good one.
And in fact, I am recording that interview in just a few days. And then I'm excited to bring this new [00:01:00] format to you probably about once a month going forward.
All right, with that exciting news out of the way, it is time to dig into today's episode, which is a timely episode. I am calling it "how to rest and still get things done: a holiday survival guide." And that is because this episode is coming out in December, which tends to be a busy holiday month for many people.
But even if you do not celebrate any holidays in December, or even if you're listening to this episode well in the future, at a future December, or there is a different kind of busy season going on, the tips I share today will be relevant because we are talking about balance.
And I know balance is a tricky subject because is there even really such a thing? Like I don't even know.
But busy seasons can challenge us in September for those of us with kids who are going back to school, or if you yourself are a student and you're going [00:02:00] back to school or maybe during exam season or a busy period at your company, when you know, the year closes. Regardless, in today's episode, you are going to learn some practical strategies for staying productive and still getting some rest during busy seasons, particularly the holidays.
And as you know, the holiday season can pull us often into different directions.
One part of us, you know, wants to push forward and stay productive and continue with the momentum that we've created for ourselves.
And another part often creates create craves rest and relaxation.
The good news is that you do not have to just pick one.
As I mentioned, the goal of this season is to find a way to balance productivity and rest to end the year on a high note without burning out.
Now with that said, I'm going to organize today's episode into two parts.
At least that's how I'm planning it now. We'll see how it ends. [00:03:00]
One part is going to be about staying productive while you're in holiday mode, a holiday mode. I have three tips for maintaining some momentum. And then part two is going to be about making sure that you um, can get some strategic rest in there.
And there's three tips for that as well.
At the end, I'll bring it all together and show you how these two concepts are not mutually exclusive. And that yes, you can have your cake and eat it too. All right. If that sounds good to you, you are in the right place.
All right. So like I said, we're going to begin with some strategies for staying productive while in holiday mode. I have [00:04:00] three strategies to share.
Tip number one is to prioritize like a pro.
There is only a little bit of time left in the year, if you are listening to this in December. And that means that you likely won't have time to get to every task that you want to complete during this holiday season.
And that is absolutely okay.
As a reminder, my goal for this episode today is not to share strategies for cramming more work into a short amount of time. That's just never the angle that I have. Right? Rather, my goal is to share tips to modify what's on your to-do list so that you feel peaceful and productive. Okay, which I assure you is possible.
So back to prioritizing prioritizing tasks is a skill and like any skill, some people are better at it than others. Um, some people have more experience with it than others, but you can get better at it. [00:05:00]
Now I understand the inclination to think that absolutely everything is important.
Trust me, that is my default way of operating for sure. But the reality is that not everything on our to-do list has equal importance.
Now sitting on the other side of this microphone I can't tell you. Which of your tasks deserves more of your attention as we round out the year. So that is the work that you are going to have to do. But I'm just encouraging you to do it.
All right. So how do we prioritize tasks? The first step always of prioritizing anything is to make sure that you have total clarity and inventory on what those tasks are.
We talk a lot about task management in this podcast. If you go to learnandworksmarter.com the website, and you type task management into the search bar- there's this little search field there- [00:06:00] you will get the results for all of the episodes where we talk about task management and task management systems. I've organized the website that way. Okay.
Even if the word task management is not in the title itself, and we talk about task management -I've categorized it that way.
This is important. Because if we don't know what the things are that we have to do, there's no way we can prioritize them. Which means that we're just going to complete tasks as they occur to us, or as people ask us to do them. And that is not a recipe for restful productivity.
So in a basic level, you can start by simply just writing down all the tasks you need to get done between now and the end of the year or some defined period- if you're not listening to this in December.
You could do this in the context of work, you can do it in the context of school, you can certainly do it in the context of your personal life. Right? And sometimes you can combine them too. Make sure you really write these down somewhere so you can see them. Keeping tasks in our head is absolutely pointless.
Right? That's not what our brains are [00:07:00] made for.
Next, we look at our list and we ask ourself what must get done before the year ends? And notice I'm not suggesting you ask the question, what do I want to do? What do I want to get done? But what must get done? And that is where the prioritization skills kick in.
We start with the must and then we move to want.
Anything that is not a must, anything that is not critical, gets removed from your list. Trust me, it's not that you're not going to do them. Okay let me be clear. We are not saying that these tasks are unimportant. We're just saying that in the next few weeks, during the holiday season, You are going to temporarily put them aside.
Now, if you are like me, you may have a voice in your head that says, but wait, like these are super important. But like, Are they? Really? According to who?
According to what standard? According to what measurement stick? According [00:08:00] to what timeline? Or perhaps, you know, maybe completing those tasks would make us feel good and relieved and that's it. But again, if we're unable to separate the must tasks from the want to tasks, then we haven't quite mastered the skill of prioritization yet.
There are some prioritization matrix, matrices, matrixes, matrices you can use frameworks, whatever, the Eisenhower matrix is one of them. You can Google that and you can learn how to do it. Again, that is the Eisenhower matrix. Um, it is a simple framework to help you prioritize the items on your list. It's like a four-square grid. There are different categories. Google it. Okay.
And then what about all those tasks that you've determined are not critical? They still exist and a stay in our task management system until the holiday season is over. I
Remember the title of this episode is how to rest and still get things done. It is not how to rest and still get absolutely everything on your entire list done. [00:09:00] Okay. Big difference.
All right. We're going to move on to tip two- use time blocking to tame the holiday chaos.
As I'm saying that out loud, it sounds a little cheesy, but like use time-blocking. Yes. We talk a lot about time-blocking on this podcast. Again, if you go to learnandworksmarter.com and type in time management into the search bar, you're going to get all the results of all the episodes in which we talk about time-blocking, all right?
The reason that I'm suggesting time-blocking during the holiday season is that this is the time of year when our calendars are often packed with non-typical events and activities. And some of them are unpredictable as well. And while these events are not typical, they're also non-trivial and they take up space in our calendars that we have to acknowledge.
So even if you don't typically time block, I suggest you give it a try just for the remaining weeks of this holiday season.
You would start by adding [00:10:00] in the non-typical events, things like holiday parties, family commitments, other social or work events, even time needed to prepare for the holiday.
You can combine personal events with work events, with school events, whatever. You can have like some master list, right. And once you block out these chunks of time, you'll be able to better visualize where your free time is, and by free time, I mean time to be productive and to work on those critical tasks, that you identified in the first step. Ah, tip tip.
Oh my gosh. Also, we're going to come back to this time block that you make in this tip here for part two, when we talk about the rest strategies and how to find time to integrate rest into a schedule that is still moving forward.
Okay, so do not skip this step.
This is a step where we look at our task lists and we look at our calendars and we marry the two.
Do you have a huge financial report due at the end of the [00:11:00] year? Okay. Well, when are you going to work on that? Right. Like, look at your calendar and maybe find a series of 90-minute chunks over the next few weeks that you can dedicate to working just on this one report.
Telling yourself that you'll just do it over the next few weeks can actually be more stressful than saying I will work on it on Monday from 1-2:30.
I'll work on it for Tuesday from 3-4:30 and so on. Okay. Our brains like clarity and time-blocking provides clarity.
All right, moving on to tip three: leverage the quiet period. And this might sound contradictory because I know that the holidays is a busy time. But there is one context in which there's usually some quietude.
I think that's the word.
When I worked in corporate, I actually enjoyed the month of December in the office 'cause most people took time off and the working environment was quieter and there were a few work emails and meetings and less general noise. [00:12:00]
And it can be a good idea to use these quieter workdays, to tackle our projects that require a deeper level of focus. Having fewer meetings on the schedule, fewer people stopping by our desk, fewer, you know, pings and requests.
All of this supports an environment of productivity that is helpful as we focus on those high impact tasks that we identified in tip one.
If you are a working professional and you often work from home, this might be, you know, the time that you might want to consider heading into the office, if you have that option.
That might sound bananas, but during the holiday season, we are sometimes in an in-office setting, that's a little less chaotic than a home office will all the triggers and reminders of all of the sort of holiday things that have to get done at home. If you don't have an office to go to, but the idea of removing yourself from all the triggers at home is appealing then look at your calendar and identify maybe two days a week over the next few weeks where you can rent out a study space [00:13:00] in the public library. This is free. okay?. When I say rent out, I just mean like reserve.
You know, I love a good coffee shop, but that is not always the ideal environment for everybody. Only you can be the judge of that.
Okay. So to recap, the three strategies for maintaining some level of productivity during a holiday season, we have to prioritize your tasks and be realistic about moving non-critical tasks to after the holiday season is over.
Tip two is to acknowledge that there will be non-typical demands on your time and to consider using time-blocking to build in periods of high intensity work blocks around these events. As a quick reminder, a few 90-minute deep concentration blocks are so much better for your productivity than a fragmented approach, and frankly ineffective approach to telling yourself of telling yourself that you're just going to work on the things when you have time.
And finally number three was to take advantage of quieter office times and [00:14:00] leverage this lull in emails and demands to make real progress on those critical tasks that must get done before the year ends. Then all of this goes without saying that every episode of this podcast where we talk about focus will also be helpful as you attempt to streamline your productivity this season.
A few episodes about focus that you might find helpful
are episode 43 how to focus when you're working from home; episode 36, how to stop procrastinating- that is always a relevant topic; episode 24, I'm going out of order, but whatever, how to focus, that's um, better tips for school work and ADHD; and then episode 10, which is tips for better task management and focus.
All of those episodes will be linked below whether you're watching this in YouTube or listening on a podcast app.
You can also find the direct links to each of those episodes [00:15:00] learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/51, because this is episode 51.
Okay, now it is time to move on to part two, which is strategies for achieving strategic rest.
And yes, I am fully aware that I just said achieving rest. And that might have a kind of contradictory connotation to it, but I am going to stick with it because if we are busy individuals, which you are if you're listening to this episode, then rest does often require intention in planning. And for some of us, this is actually an achievement. So that's why I'm going with it. All right.
So let's start with why it matters to build in some intentional rest this holiday season. I mean, Some productivity experts, experts like super air quoting that might encourage you to just rally and step it up and get all of your pistons firing as you kick it into gear for the remaining weeks of the holiday [00:16:00] season.
Yes. I think I just used every single, you know, weird hustle expression that exists, but you get the idea. This is not the advice that I am sharing with you today. There is a time and a place for hustle and for lighting all of your pistons. But I don't think that the holiday season is at all an inappropriate time for that.
Right. So, first of all, rest is absolutely a critical ingredient for productivity. I don't think that this fact is talked about enough and it might seem contrarian. But it is true. If we are all work and no rest, then we reach burnout so quickly. When we enter a state of burnout, we become nonproductive. And when we become non-productive, we lose our motivation. And this, my friends is a recipe for disaster and it will take you in the [00:17:00] opposite direction of the title of this episode. I'm going to read you something I haven't printed out here.
Um, it there's a book. Okay. It's titled why you get more done when you work less and it's by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. And he says that and I'm quoting this, "rest is an essential component of working well and working smart rest helps us to think innovate and increase our productivity. Even in our brains resting state when we're not directly focused on a task is still active, engaging its default network to plug away at problems, examine and toss out possible answers and look for new information."
I'm going to leave a link to that article. So that's actually an article in which he's talking about his book. That's not a quote from the book, but I'll leave that link in the show notes. Now I know that my listeners are smart enough to understand that rest is essential, but I included that quote from a U Penn PhD and Stanford University professor just so you take this as seriously as you should.
Okay, so now let's get into the [00:18:00] strategies of strategic rest.
My favorite is number three, but, um, for some reason I. I'm not starting there, whatever. Tip one is to plan your rest intentionally.
If you are a go, go, go kind of person, which I'm assuming you are if you're listening to a podcast about how to maintain some level of productivity during the season, when most people just check out altogether, then I'm suggesting that you treat your rest like an appointment.
What do I mean, well, if your boss scheduled a meeting with you from two to three on a Wednesday, You would show up to that meeting at two o'clock on Wednesday. If you had something else planned, you would probably prioritize. that meeting with your boss.
Now you are your most important boss.
If you truly want to build in some rest during this holiday season, when you know you can't stop working completely. Right. And if you're not all talk, if you're like, actually I'm secretly going to continue to work forever, but I just want to talk about rest. All right, then, then you got to treat it [00:19:00] like an appointment. If you're for real, you got to do for real strategies.
Right. And that's why I suggested time-blocking back in part one.
Again, even if you're not typically a time-blocking enthusiast, it can be a terrific tool to use just during this holiday season.
When we make our time visible by blocking out commitments on a calendar that we can see, okay, you can see for sure where you have chunks of time to work and chunks of time to rest.
Right. I said we were going to come back to this.
For some of us, this naturally falls in the, you know, after work hours, perhaps in the evening. But depending on your schedule, you may find that you have more time to rest intentionally I don't know, like on Thursday mornings or Monday afternoons.
All of us have different schedules.
And so I will never prescribe a right time to rest. But I am prescribing that you do rest and then you schedule it and plan it like a boss. [00:20:00] Like a boss that is scheduling a meeting. Put it on the calendar. Even if you don't know exactly what you're going to do during that time, and we'll talk about that, block it out and protect it.
Like I said, we're going to dig a little bit more into what rest might look like in tip three.
But that tip won't matter at all if you do not at first, make a commitment to yourself on the calendar.
All right. So we are going to move to tip two, which is to rest in micro-moments. All right. So during busy seasons rest does not have to mean stop everything. It's not drop everything and take a nine-hour nap. If that was your objective, or if that was what your intention was, then we're kind of talking more about like a vacation. Or taking time off from work, in which case, like take time off from work and take a nine hour nap. Right, but that is not the topic of today's episode.
Today's episode is how to do both, right? It's about how to have your cake and eat it [00:21:00] too. It's about how to continue moving the needle on a select few projects at work while at the same time rejuvenating yourself so that you don't feel burned out. And it's hard for me to sit here and authentically say yes, and, you know, Take a nine hour nap and then go back to your to-do list. That's not the strategy that I'm proposing.
Instead we can achieve restfulness by using micro moments to recharge without losing the momentum that we're also working really hard to maintain. Now one way to do this is, you know, while we're waiting for a meeting to start, while, we are standing in line, while we're sitting in traffic let yourself zone out instead of multitasking. Turn off your podcasts. He, unless it's this one. Turn off all the stimulation and just zone out. Walk to your class or to your car without scrolling on your phone. Close your eyes for [00:22:00] 60 seconds and just exist before the next thing has to start.
You know how I'm always talking about breaking big projects into smaller tasks. Right- and that's how you get things done?
That's essentially what we're doing here too. Think about it. If you had a 20 page research paper to write, you don't sit down and tell yourself, okay, well, if I don't write all 20 of these pages in one sitting, then I might as well not do it at all. Right. That's that's not what we do.
So instead we might write a little bit here, we might write a little bit there -and then the cumulative effect of all these sort of micro efforts are still going to produce the final 20 page paper. And it's the same thing with rest. We can do it incrementally and it can still have a cumulative effect in the end.
These tiny pauses can help reset our energy without pulling us away from what needs to get done. There a way to rest while staying productive. Which I would call a survival strategy [00:23:00] for the holiday chaos.
Finally tip three. My favorite. Do rest your way.
Not all rest is created equal. And honestly not all rest feels restful.
The key here is to find what actually works for you.
Some people recharged by, you know, curling up with Netflix and a snack. Others might find rest by going out with friends, cooking something, maybe going for a run. Yes. Movement can be rest if it calms your brain. That's honestly my ideal kind of rest.
We want to avoid getting stuck in the idea that rest like has to look a certain way, that it should be something, what matters is how it makes us feel. It's about recharging in a way that feels right for our mind and our body, whether that's silence, creativity, movement friends. So experiment a little; figure out what leaves you feeling [00:24:00] refreshed and energized.
And then that's the sweet spot.
I said earlier in the episode that this tip was my favorite and it truly is 'cause I know for certain, at this point in my life that my own family's idea of rest is even different than mine. My ultimate form of rest is to have a super hard workout. One where I molecularly do not have one drop left to give and then having a good healthy meal. And then staying in my home. Some people might find this stressful, but I find it rejuvenating.
Sometimes my rest even involves doing a little bit of cleaning or organizing or yes, even some work. I'll tell you what my idea of rest does not include.
It doesn't include getting my nails done or going to a bar. Or lounging on a couch or taking a nap. None of that fills me up and I have always been that way.
You have my permission to rest in any way that feels restful to you, even if it's a little bit outside the box. Even if it looks [00:25:00] different from how people in your own household are resting.
Here's the thing: productivity and rest are not opposites.
They do actually support each other. When we allow ourselves to rest intentionally, whether it's in those micro-moments we were talking about, or by leaning into activities that feel restorative to us, we're not stepping away from being productive- we are fueling our productivity.
To make this work in real life, think about ways to balance the two that fit your schedule and your needs. Maybe that looks like a three-day sprint of focused work, you know, followed by a full day off to recharge.
Perhaps you designate mornings for productivity and evenings for rest during this holiday season.
The structure doesn't matter as much as the intention you put into making that structure.
The key is to experiment. You want to try different combinations of work [00:26:00] and rest to figure out what leaves you feeling both accomplished and recharged. Nobody gets it right the first time and what works for you one week might even shift the next week. And that is okay. You are both the scientist and the experiment.
The goal is to give yourself permission to rest in ways that serve you and that support your productivity and not to guilt yourself into believing it is an all or nothing game.
Because at the end of the day, rest is not about just surviving air quoting again, the holidays; it's about showing up for your life, your work, your relationships, your goals as the best version of yourself. And that version of you is absolutely only possible when you're taking care of both your to-do list and your wellbeing.
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Learn and Work Smarter. I hope these tips gave you some fresh ideas for how to balance rest and productivity during the busiest time of year and give you some hope that [00:27:00] it is possible to have your cake and eat it too.
If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review.
It really helps more than you'll ever know.
And if you want more strategies for staying organized and productive, two places, you can go. Check out all of my resources on schoolhabits.com or look at all my other episodes that are on learnandworksmarter.com. I will leave those links in the show notes. Until next time, remember, rest is not the opposite of getting things done. It is just part of how we get there. Take care. I'll see you in the next episode. And never stop learning.
