How to get Organized for Christmas

Christmas is almost here! It’s a great occasion to spend quality time with family and friends. And eat. Lots.

But Christmas and the holiday period can be stressful too. Especially if you’re hosting between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. Between buying presents, planning and preparing meals, and making sure that your guests are comfortable, there’s a lot to do. It doesn’t help that shopping around Christmas can make you question the entire basis of our civilization. It’s a hectic time and it can leave you feeling like this:

So what do you do if you have to schedule a lot of different activities involving a lot of different people?

We love list so we’ve made one with some of the scheduling tools we love and how you can use them to get organized for the holidays.

Stay up-to-date with Evernote

Evernote is a great tool for collecting inspiration from a variety of sources. It’s also useful if you need to remember which toys, books, or video games have been suggested as present ideas!

If there’s a particular item you want to buy but are hoping it will go on sale, you can connect it to your calendar and set up a reminder so that you don’t forget in the midst of everything else that’s going on. We’ve built a free calendar connector to help you do just that.

You can also use it to create mood boards and inspire your decorations or festive food. You could also use Pinterest to do this, but you wouldn’t be able to connect it to your calendar.

List everything you have to do in Trello

There isn’t a time when lists come in more handy than around Christmas. There’s just so much to keep track of. Between groceries, decorations, and guests’ preferences, it can be overwhelming.

Trello is one of our favorite tools for staying on top of projects. What makes it great for work projects makes it ideal for personal ones, too.

With Trello you can create a board for everything you need to do, such as the Christmas dinner or present shopping. You can then create specific cards for everything you need to buy like Christmas cake ingredients or presents requests, then attach due dates to them. These due dates can then be synced to your calendar so that you can see in your calendar what you need to do and for when. That way, you can bake your Christmas cake well in advance, giving the flavors plenty of time to mature!

Get everyone together in group chats

The more people you need to get together for the festive season, the harder it is to organize. That’s why tools like Slack or WhatsApp are great for having group conversations where everyone can chime in.

If you are like us you might have a personal chat room with your friends as well as all your work ones. That can come in handy when coordinating who needs to bring what for Christmas Day.

If you coordinate everything in Slack, you can get answers to your questions straight away. Using our free calendar connector, you can also add events to your calendar directly from your channels.

Don’t miss out on deals!

Sales are my favorite part of the festive season. I once got 80% off some baubles for the Christmas tree because I waited until the sales.

To make sure that you don’t miss a bargain, you can set up notifications in your calendar about when your favorite stores start their sales. Some advertise this in advance, while others prefer to do a Beyonce. Make sure you’re signed up to the mailing lists of your favorite stores so that they’ll let you know when the sales start.

Sometimes you can even bag a bargain by logging into your favorite shopping site, putting something into your basket, then leaving without buying anything. This doesn’t work for every store, but if you’re willing to take the risk and wait for your purchase, you can get as much as another 20% off. Make sure their emails don’t go into your spam folder though or you could miss out!

Schedule, schedule, schedule!

Whatever the occasion it doesn’t hurt to be organized. It can be the different between a stressful and exhausting Christmas and making the most of the holidays. The more things you can schedule automatically, the less you’ll have to worry about while you’re spending time with family and friends.

How do you get organized at Christmas?

What are your tips for getting organized over the festive period? We’d love to hear your tips on Twitter!

Merry Christmas from everyone at Cronofy!

‍

‍