Preparing for upcoming busy seasons has become like my own personal Olympics.
Thrilling hobby, I know.
If you’re new to the blog, I recently wrote The Busy Season Survival Guide, which is a cumulation of a decade of lessons I’ve learned about managing busy season burnout while trying to stay connected to creativity. This guide is meant to support you in staying resilient and creative, even with a demanding day job!
Admittedly, the guide is a bit of a read, so I thought I’d try to create a sort-of “cheat-sheet” checklist to help you prepare for an upcoming busy season.
Here it is: 6 things you can do now to get yourself ready for an upcoming busy season!
1. Align with Your Path and Purpose
How do your efforts at work fit into the grand scheme of things for you? This will keep you grounded, bolster your motivation, and help keep those tougher days in perspective.
- More about this grounding practice in the post How to Stay Grounded During Busy Seasons: Start With Your “Why”
- If you’re not really sure what the grand scheme of things looks like, check out Reflection and Direction: Charting the Course for a Creative New Year for practical tips.
- For further introspection, read What Are We Searching For? (Exploring the answer within ourselves)
- And finally, you might enjoy this whimsical post on following your unique path: Are You Lost? (Offering You Some Heartfelt Encouragement)
2. Focus On Your Work-Life Balance
No, you won’t have “work-life balance” when things get really busy at work. What you will have is a strong baseline sense of what balance looks like for you! This will help you get a sense of how far off you might be at any given point, and the most impactful ways tip the scales back.
Try these:
- Make a list of what the most important things are for you to feel balanced. What do you need in your daily, weekly, and monthly calendar?
- Map out what an “ideal week” would look like that would keep you in balance, as a baseline.
- Consider in advance how much more you will have to work, and how to best modify that “balanced” schedule to accommodate it. What can you reduce or move temporarily?
- Keep your list available to refer back to. When you’re feeling too imbalanced, you can pull what you need most from the list.
Check out How to Find Your Unique Work-Life Balance to dive deeper.
For an introspective journaling opportunity, try Create a Work-Life Balance Unique to You (6 Introspective Steps).
3. Prepare a Meaningful Project
Sort-of a “bonus” work-life balance tip: having a meaningful project to return to helps maintain more autonomy, accomplishment, and authenticity in your otherwise hectic work week.
Of course, it’s hard to start something new and inspired while you’re in the midst of a busy season! So get one started now that you can easily return to when things get busy.
A bit more on why this works in the post Want to Overcome Overwhelm? Your Hobby Is The Key!
If you need ideas for a “meaningful project”, you might like:
- How to Make ‘Finding Your Hobby’ a Grounding Personal Project
- How to Create a Meaningful Personal Project From Your Hobby
4. Eliminate the Non-Essential
It’s time to simplify. Do you have tasks you can delegate? Activities you can minimize? Processes that could be more efficient? Let’s turn our attention to those now!
- Collaborate with your household: What tasks can you contribute? What could others help with? This is also a great time to establish expectations for your availability.
- Declutter your space: Pre-busy season is a great time to get rid of clutter and organize your environment. The aim is to leave calm, streamlined spaces. You can also declutter digital spaces by deleting emails you don’t need, removing apps you don’t use, etc.
- Declutter your mind: Bust out your bullet journal and start writing down all of the things that niggle at your mind: lingering to-dos, big dreams you haven’t got started on, people you miss, etc. Getting it all down on paper will free up space to either engage or intentionally defer.
5. Show Future You Some Love
If you have time and energy now, you can use it to help take care of your future self for when things get really busy:
- Prepare freezer-friendly meals and start stocking up to give yourself healthy home-cooked options! It’s nice to have a handy alternative to takeout that you can rely on.
- Plan out a few healthy low-effort dinners that you can rotate through during busy weeks. This really helps to decrease decision-fatigue (and time spent cooking!).
- Stock up on healthy snacks to reach for (or make a list of healthy options to choose from in the future). You’ll feel much better avoiding the super-processed go-tos that are very tempting but leave us feeling crummy.
- Adjust your workspace ergonomics to be as supportive as possible during those long work days.
- Definitively separate your work and living spaces if you work from home. Consider how you might to create visual boundaries (which will support your work-life ones!).
- Find a low-maintenance plant for your workspace! There’s something calming yet energizing about adding a little greenery to a desk or nearby shelf.
- Check your sleep hygiene and streamline your wind-down routine. Adequate sleep is crucial, and we want to establish those good sleep habits early on!
- Arrange a standing date with a friend or family – it could even be a monthly coffee – to help make sure you get that much-needed time to connect outside of work.
- If your busy season has a definitive end, think about all of the fun ways to relax and recharge when it’s over – and plan them out!
6. Create a Dopamine Menu
Creating a list of healthy and effective energy-boosting activities can really help you streamline your busy season by keeping your energy up. Relying on a dopamine menu will help you avoid time-sucks and other solutions that are tempting, but leave you feeling crummy.
- What are some healthy feel-good activities that can be done in 5 minutes?
- How about in 30 minutes?
- And on the rare occasion that you have an hour or more?
As a bonus, you can also familiarize with the 7 types of rest and factor in a little restful action in each category as a reminder for when you need it.
Are You Ready?
A strong mix of introspective activities and practical actions will get you ready for your upcoming busy season with the aim to keep you motivated, (mostly) energized, and ahead of burnout.
Want to go deeper? Check out the Busy Season Survival Guide, particularly Part 2: Practical Preparation.
Preparation can do wonders to help get you through your busiest seasons relatively unscathed! What are your favourite prep strategies? Share in the comments!
Stay connected with your creativity before busy season hits by joining the monthly newsletter for reflections, creative insights, and “what’s new” on the blog.
