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Like any other year, when the year ends, we begin to reflect. Are you energized for the year that was? Did you experience any life-changing achievements? Stressed by all the outstanding tasks that still need to be completed before the year ends? Disappointed by unattained goals or healing from scars? Most importantly, how are you managing the year coming to an end?

The last couple of months of the year is always busy for everyone. If you’re a student, you’re completing final assignments and preparing for exams or if you’re an employee, you’re wrapping up projects, preparing year-end reports, and making plans for the upcoming 12 months. Add to that the potential stress of family get-togethers and festivities over the holidays, so it’s easy to see how stress levels can start to soar.

While a bit of stress over short periods can improve your performance, high levels of stress that last for longer than a couple of days can have a serious impact on your body and mind. Symptoms of stress include head, neck, and backache; low energy levels; anxiety and depression; forgetfulness; and irritability. And when you’re experiencing one or more of these symptoms, it’s not too long before both your personal and professional life and or academic start to suffer. So, how can you better manage everything and keep your sanity?

Fortunately, there are several ways to handle year-end stress. Keep the following tips in mind:

Learn how to manage other people’s expectations of you

After altering your own expectations, learn how to manage other people’s expectations of you. Talk to some of your colleagues, friends, and family members about the real expectations that can be completed before the year ends. And if there are some unrealistic expectations that you have identified and would like to either shift to the following year or delegate, be transparent about that.

Break down tasks into bite sizes

One of the biggest stressors is the size of what you have to accomplish. Sometimes just viewing the lists of what we need to do can be massive but it is always about perspective. If possible, break down those big tasks into smaller tasks that can be achieved. This is to help us feel a sense of accomplishment so that we are not overwhelmed.

Do something you enjoy every day. 

Set aside 30 minutes to an hour for an activity you love, such as reading, listening to music, playing your favourite sport, or meeting with a friend. This can help you relax and increase your resilience to stress.

Practice self-care

We tend to put all of our projects and others ahead of us during the end of the year mad rush to get it all done. Don’t do this. You’ll be better equipped to handle stress if your mind and body are healthy. Eat healthy food, drink plenty of water, exercise, and get enough sleep.

The end of the year comes with celebrating various holidays and welcoming in a brand-new year. It should be a time of joy and yet; it often comes with the stress of having too much to do and not enough time to get it all done. Following some of these tips might just help you get your energy back and enjoy this holiday time and ringing in the New Year.

Whether you are looking to advance your marks, change directions, planning ahead will help you stay focused. Planning is significant as it directs us on how to tackle the year ahead. We just need to be flexible, acknowledge that our plans will have to accommodate for some uncertainty.

Review the past year

Before you can plan for the year ahead, you need to review the year you have just had. And don’t only assume everything was awful.

• Acknowledge the victories, mistakes, experiences that grew your skills, and those that didn’t.
• Look at what moved you forward and what held you back. Write these details down so that you can use them to make a strategically sound plan for the year ahead.
• Identify three large wins and three areas that needed work.
• Look at how you spend your time through the year – did it align with your goals and what didn’t.

Establish a routine

Aristotle once said, “we are what we repeatedly do”. Routines are conscious ways of doing things repetitively and in a specific order. For example, waking up at a certain time every day and sleeping at a certain time, having coffee, going to class, going to the gym and studying for an x amount of time. Creating routines is important because they help promote self-care and create healthy habits. Having a routine can lead to happiness and fulfillment because we can accomplish the most important things to do vs the urgent things.

Having a routine and sticking to it is incredible, however, you should give yourself time. Productive habits take time to develop. If you are too hard on yourself, you might never have the chance of enjoying the benefits of a routine. Your success depends on how seriously you take your routine.

Create a schedule – daily, weekly and monthly

• Write down all the important dates and deadlines you know for the year. Some you might not know immediately but as you find out, keep filling in the dates.
• Write clear and measurable goals.
• Create a specific action plan for each goal.
• Think about big quarterly events and schedule those too. It helps you to plan your week in advance instead of scrambling for time to get everything done. It also helps with delegation too.

Avoid procrastination

You are more likely to procrastinate if you don’t have a set plan or idea. If you know what you need to do and by when, then it makes it easier to eliminate most distractions. By limiting the number of distractions around you, you’re more likely to get done what you need to do. Shut your phone off or set it on flight mode, retreat to a quiet place and listen to classical music, study in the library as opposed to your room where you might be tempted to sleep in your room.

Work on a side hustle

Even if you’re a student, it’s okay for your plans to include sheer enjoyment and recreation. Without distracting your studying, exploring your passions and interests can help you learn new skills and techniques that might not be taught in a traditional workplace. And who knows, it might also help advance your career.

The beautiful thing about side hustles is that they encourage creativity, self-development and confidence.

Reward yourself and celebrate your accomplishments

It’s very important to attach an incentive to complete a task and perhaps incorporating this in your planning might help. After studying for a test or completing an assignment, consider giving yourself a reward. It could be as simple as, “Once I finish this assignment, I can watch an episode of my favorite show.”

Online fatigue is a state of mental and/or emotional exhaustion that materializes among people who spend considerable time using different digital tools – often for continuous periods of time.

The frequent use of these platforms might involve the management of your educational activities and information across different platforms and (perhaps) devices. Maintaining communication with teachers, other faculty members, and fellow learners, writing online exams, socializing with family and friends, etc.

And of course, remote working has allowed students and professionals in different industries across the world to keep safe from the dreadful Covid-19 epidemic. It’s also presented us with flexible hours, increased productivity, and time to do other things in our lives. On the other hand, it has changed the way we connect with each other, our relationship with work and has surely catapulted the use of screens to a whole new level.

It’s the nature of the beast nicknamed ‘20-Plenty’, and the digital era.

Needless to say, if not used with the objective of finding a healthy balance, technology can invade our lives in ways that undermine our well-being.

Internet connectivity, as the necessary equalizer of opportunity that it is, doesn’t have to be a threat to our minds. And in the spirit of encouraging health, here are four ways to mitigate the effects of this type of fatigue:

First, start being aware of your screen time

It’s fairly easy to power up the phone to read emails and end up surrendering to the bottomless social media feed. Done for a long time, the habit carries the potential to shift priorities and negate the depth of your personal interactions with people and the world around you. Hence it’s important to keep track of how and which platforms you spend most of your time.

It’s become essential to ask: what type of impact are my online activities having on the quality of my life?

Take-away: Track the screen-time on your phone. For iOS, you’ve got Screen Time Settings and on Android, there’s the Google’s Digital Wellbeing toolkit. And there are plenty of apps that can help in that regard as well.

Get more sleep

The experience of studying through learning management systems makes it easy to work through study material at any time of the day.

And when sleep falls off your daily routine due to academic, social, and extracurricular activities, so too does intellect and memory. Getting sufficient sleep helps with the processing of information (which, let’s face it, you have to do all the time) and restores our mental and physical abilities.

Take-away: Try cutting off the use of devices an hour or two before bedtime, and avoid bringing your phone or computer to the bedroom.

Learn again to live fully in the present

At some point or another, we’ve been guilty of pulling out our phones when we experience remarkable – and sometimes awkward – moments. It could be while having lunch with a friend we haven’t seen for a long time, at a party or other type of occasion that we feel needs to be documented.

However, there’s value in living life without yearning to record and publish everything for the world to see. You could also take it a step further and leave your phone behind, except when you’re on standby for an important call or message.

Allan Watts reminds us: “One fine day, you’ll realise that there is no way at all of having your mind anywhere else but in the present moment. Because even when you think about the past or the future you’re doing it now, don’t you?”

Take-away: Remind yourself all the time that life is transient and there’s nothing more important to fuss over than the present moment.

Look after yourself

Setting time aside for you is important. Especially because the boundaries between work and relaxation have gone blurred. Our personal and professional lives come embedded with countless hours of screen-time.

As a result, dedicating time to self-care isn’t always easy to do. And as we’ve established, most of us are witlessly busy with schoolwork and are absorbed with technology to set aside time for ourselves. So quality me-time is normally pushed to last on the agenda. The other thing, we may feel guilty about prioritising the time needed to take decent care of ourselves.

Take-away: Eat wholesome meals, exercise frequently, travel, revisit a hobby, and say no to commitments that leave you burnt out. When your mind, emotions and overall health are in sound balance, it frees up energy to ace your studies and feel on top of the world while doing it.

Final thought

Taking time to establish a balance between being a digital native and diligently attending to ‘offline duties’ will help you stay grounded and healthy as you build your career.