Holidays and vacations offer a special opportunity to rest, reflect on the past few months, and prepare for the coming months. To understand how to recapture this opportunity and make your holidays and vacation both restful and productive, it’s important to first understand our tendencies. Among working professionals, we have found that there are three types of holiday time misusers:

1. Couch Potato: After couch potatoes send their last work email before the holidays, they flip the off switch and sink into complete disengagement.
2. Holiday Humbug: Holiday humbugs keep working straight through the holiday.
3. Workaholidayic: The workaholidayic takes their workaholic tendencies and simply applies them to a different context. Rather than rushing from one work meeting to next, they rush from one holiday party or tourist attraction to the next. 

With your tendency in mind, pick from this list of tactics you can use to chart a healthier course for your next holiday or vacation:

• Set sustainability goals for your holiday or vacation
• Prioritize processing time
• Set goals for the next year or season and spend more time planning how to achieve your goals than you do setting your goals
• Create and uphold holiday/vacation traditions
  
  
  
  

This is an excerpt of the article “How to Actually Come Back from the Holidays Feeling Refreshed” we published in Harvard Business Review.