How Our Team Prepares for Holiday Time Off (Steal These Strategies)
Episode 596: Show Notes
In this episode we’re talking all things holiday and work and productivity and delegation and organizing and all of that good stuff! If you haven’t listened to any of our previous episodes about taking the full month of December off, we highly recommend that you go do that. But today’s episode is going to be a little bit different, because our business looks a little bit different now. We’re going through a different season in our business, so we aren’t taking the full month off like we have done in the past, we’re still going to make sure that we enjoy our holiday season!
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The Brain Dumping Activity That Clears Our Head Space
Before we get to the holiday season we like to get everything that is swirling around in our heads down on paper. As business owners, we approach the new year thinking about all the ways we can grow and the opportunities we can pursue, and if we don’t put those somewhere they can become a heavy mental load. The practice of spending 20 minutes writing things down can do wonders for clearing up all that clutter in your head. This is different from planning and goal setting; it’s literally about making a list of all the things you’ve been thinking of doing and that are preventing you from truly embracing your time-off. We then divide that “brain-dump” list into what actually legally needs to be done before the end of the year, and the things that can wait, and it just makes everything so much more manageable. Our list was 45 action-items long, but once we applied our filters we saw that only 10 of them were time sensitive! This doesn’t only have to be done at the end of the year; you can do it quarterly, or even monthly, whatever it takes to keep you and your business thriving.
Ideas For How To Make Sure That Everyone On Your Team Is On the Same Page Before Ending the Year
If you have a team that’s supporting you, they also need to know about your game plan and how they can help you out. There are less working days in December than there are in the rest of the months of the year and it’s important to communicate with your staff when you are going to be closed, and to request that they give you ample warning before they take leave so that you can plan around that. An exercise that we like to do with our team is to walk them through the “brain-dump” that we’ve done and ask them to do the same thing so that they can also get rid of the clutter and weight that they are holding onto, and perhaps open our eyes to some things that we may not have been aware of.
Our New Favorite App For Team Communications
The idea of a daily check-in was not something that appealed to Emylee at all, but Abagail managed to convince her to try out Range for a few weeks and she ended up loving it! Range syncs from your calendar, lets you know what’s assigned to you on a particular day, and allows you to share your daily check-in’s with your team. A really cool thing about Range is that it will decide on a theme for the week and ask each person a question every single day relating to that theme. It’s an amazing way to understand how your team is feeling without them having to come to you directly. Filling it in can literally take 30 seconds, and it’s so worth it. We’ve got a blog post coming out this month that goes into more detail about Range and some of our favorite tools to keep your team productive, so if you want to learn more, we highly recommend reading that!
The Importance of Celebrating Your Team
Virtual mixers have become all the rage since the pandemic, and we’ve managed to find the magic sauce that makes these a success for our team! That’s the topic of another blog post coming soon, so we’re not going to go into too much detail about our ideas around that in this episode, but we just want to emphasize how important it is to celebrate your team. And you don’t have to break the bank to do it! A solid thank you note in the mail can be just as meaningful as a big end-of-year bash. There are a lot of unmet needs that people experience during the holiday season, and as leaders, it’s your responsibility to help your team thrive, and to give yourself the space to thrive too!
Quote This
Taking the time to celebrate the people on your team is just so incredible.
Highlights
The Brain Dumping Activity That Cleared Our Head Space. [0:03:29]
Ideas For How To Make Sure That Everyone On Your Team Is On the Same Page Before Ending the Year. [0:12:48]
Our New Favorite App For Team Communications. [0:15:59]
The Importance of Celebrating Your Team. [0:26:30]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
