THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

Read time - 4 minutes

End of Year Cleanup

The holidays have felt a little weird for me this year - ith a little less to do than I’m comfortable with, I have a high potential for feeling aimless.

I’ve worked pretty hard to get comfortable with time off, but I also want to feel productive and ready for the new year to start. So I’m going to list out a few things I’ve focused on over the past week to help me get ready.

But first a little background - most of my holidays over the past 20 years have involved visiting family in the DC area where I’m from. A 5-8 day visit, mixed among running retail fitness businesses that stayed open through the holidays, meant a very jam packed holiday season.

When I left the fitness business behind, I still had 2 holiday seasons that were jammed with work - operating the rapid COVID test business at the MSP airport - the 2021 holiday season was absolute mayhem as it was the peak of our business. And 2022 was when we were shutting down - so I was really busy.

The past two years have involved substantially more downtime - I work with leadership teams in their strategic planning sessions - so there’s no sessions over the holidays, and also not much business development work to be done.

I also haven’t travelled the past two years, but my older three kids have.

So I’ve had a lot of time on my hands for about a week - which I’m not really used to.

I’ll give myself a B on how I handled the week.

I got a lot done, did a lot of reading, spent some quality time with some close friends, my partner Erin, and our 2-year old Gabriel, and took care of myself with quality sleep, great workouts, and lots of sauna/cold plunging.

I also had periods of feeling aimless, anxiety that I’m not doing enough, and generally felt down.

I still have another week mostly off ahead - and I’m hoping to make it an A.

Here’s some of the things I’ve been doing, and plan on doing over the next week to get there:

1. Email cleanup - One of my priorities this quarter is for my assistant to take over my email. To do that he has to take over not only my EOS email, but my two other email accounts - which don’t have a zero inbox. To be successful, I wanted to get to zero on all three accounts, plus have our process down for managing the emails. So this past week we’ve totally cleared out two accounts. One of which got hacked and subscribed to hundreds of newsletters - so it was a pretty large task.

2. Environment cleanup - I’m spending a day organizing parts of my house, garage, and session room, to get rid of clutter that’s not serving me, and making my primary spaces feel organized and ready for a big year.

3. Annual planning - It’s helpful to find time to reflect on the previous quarter each 90 days, and the year once a year. I’m blocking time to accomplish that before things get busy again in January - which they will.

4. Annual planning with my partner - We’re scheduled to do a session where we review the year, establish some goals for the next year, and generally spend some uninterrupted time talking about our hopes and dreams for the next year.

5. Reading - I’m spending a little extra time each day reading for pleasure. I read every day, usually in the evening, but often don’t make time to read during the day - I’m giving myself time for that over these two weeks.

6. Caring for myself - I’m giving myself an extra hour each day for whatever I want to take care of myself - whether that’s a walk, an extra sauna session, a workout, whatever I want to care for myself.

7. Focusing on sleep - I’ve been shooting for a greater than 85 sleep score each day, and have been hitting it pretty consistently

All the activities above don’t take up much extra time out of each day - so I still have time to work, take care of errands and tasks, and spend as much time as possible with my family members.

A bit of extra focus on some activities to make me feel prepared for the coming year is a great way to prime my brain for giving my best in my work, family, play, and life in general.

I hope you’ve had a great holiday season so far - I wish you a happy and fulfilling New Year.

Talk to you next week,

Mike