December Woes

Well it’s that time of year again – every office worker’s favorite or least favorite season. It’s beginning to look a lot like …, well the same as it always does. Looking out the window, I can’t discern any differences between this time of year and any other. I mean blue skies and sunny? It’s hard to get into the Christmas spirit when time ceases to exist in central/southern California. I’m reminded of the scene in “Annie Hall” where Woody Allen is going down the streets of L.A. during Christmastime after arriving from N.Y. and scoffs at our “West Coast Christmas” in his Woody Allen way.

Boy there was a lot of capitalization going on there in that last sentence.

I looked at my calendar today to plan out the rest of the month to see how best I should spend my remaining 5-days of vacation left for the year. Mapping everything out I see that we have 23 days left in the month and after carefully scheduling my vacation time around important end of the year meetings I notice that I have… only 6 work days remaining for the year! Four of those days have important meetings on them that I must schedule around and four of them are next week.

This puts me in quite the dilemma. On one hand, I will be able to spend most of the remaining month away from work and instead with friends, family and others, which I am thoroughly looking forward to after greedily saving my vacation time since I spent most of it in Europe in May. However, the briefness of my remaining work time means that more work shall be crammed into a smaller space. I only have two days without meetings, meaning two days I can actually get stuff done, which gives me about a 33% productivity rating.

With each passing day, I am both relieved and grieved. I know I won’t get everything done that I would like to before the new year, but as long as I get the important things completed, I should be okay. But of course that’s easier said than done.