Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and Happy Kwanzaa! 

With all major December holidays aligning so closely together this year, we want to wish your family a Happy Holidays! 

In order to celebrate the Holidays with our families, we will be spending time away from the office. 

Holiday Office Hours

Our management office, development teams and marketing experts will be on Christmas vacation beginning at noon on Monday, Dec. 23. We will have limited support available throughout the week, with our full team returning on Jan. 2, 2020. 

All development tasks not assigned prior to 10:00 a.m. CST, on Monday, Dec.23 will be scheduled in the order received following the holidays. 

We hope you’re able to spend time with your family, if you are in need of customer support during the holidays and you are a valued support package member you can create a help desk ticket by emailing our support desk at the email address provided to you in your support package. Our on-call support engineer will assist you in the order your support inquiry is received.

Other things you can do other than staring at your phone during the holidays

Just like that, we’re peering into another year-end holiday season as if time has zero consideration for our own personal priorities. Weird how that works, am I right? 

As the Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa holiday stare us right in the face most of us are gearing up to spend that much needed and well deserved time with our friends and families. 

Along with the needed family time, the holidays are the perfect time for all of us tech-savvy, mostly antisocial and borderline sociopaths to surround ourselves with our loved ones who unconditionally love and appreciate us for who we are outside of our professional careers. 

Like most of the magazines at any grocery store checkout lines, the neverending Instagram ads, Snapchat Stories, Facebook boosted posts and other mass media brainwashing mediums who’s sole goal is to indoctrinate our formable and formittable squishy little minds, and the holidays are the perfect time to do yourselves a favor by unplugging from our never-ending sea of internet-based work and social technologies.

Without further adieu, here are some Monstrous Tips on taking care of work and unplugging yourself for the holiday season:  

Taking care of work

We all know the the old Hungarian saying, “happy client/boss/management, happy work life,” which is pretty important if you like receiving a normal paycheck. So, before you scratch off the rest of your PTO, it’s probably a good idea for you to know what work tasks you should finish up. 

Make a List, Check It Twice

First, make a short list of WTBD (that’s ‘work to be done’ for all of you Boomers). Your list might have items such as: 

• answering old dusty management/client emails 

• adding a preferably non-hostile vacation auto responder to your email to politely inform others of your physical absence and your flat-out refusal to even check email while you’re away from the office (even though everyone knows you’ll at least check it) 

• cleaning your desk of fingernail clippings, empty diet soda and Pringles cans 

• completing whatever you can on all other related lingering projects 

Plan on doing whatever you can, with what time you have, to lower the amount you have to do upon your return.  

Secondly, prioritize that list by what's most important. 

Lastly, do the work! Then once you’re done with each item you can cross it off the list, earning for yourselves the magical feeling of accomplishment. The feeling of work-related accomplishment is almost a good as the feeling of shaving the back hair off a hibernating grizzly bear and then selling it for some nice coin on the black market, so the legends tell. 

No Phone-Zones

I’m prefacing this entire section with the 2018 rap demi-god Lil Scrapyd$’s hit song’s bridge goes.. “Oh, No, Throw That Phone Straight Out The Win-dow!”  

Yaaas! You finished all of your work and struck lines through that list. Let me be the first to say “congratulations!” Doesn’t that feel nice? Oh, and between you and everyone else reading this blog (we’re all pretty much a family now) just know that it’s okay to feel good about yourselves. So feel great! No, grand! Now let’s improve on that feeling even more by creating for yourselves a “No Phone-Zone.”

Your next step in your new-found feeling of grandure is to cut yourself away from your phones. Your primary reason for doing this should be removing yourself away from your work-related emails, instant messages, phone calls, etc. Close that door and like the aforementioned hit rap song says, “Straight Out The Win-dow.” 

Disclaimer, we cannot be held responsible for you actually throwing your phone or other communication device out your window. I’d imagine that would be condoned by your employer if they provided you that phone/device.The hard truth, phones cost money. You also might hit someone with said device and that wouldn’t be good either. 

The “No Phone-Zone” will help you to experience a guilt-free holiday break. Your family, friends and anyone else helping you throw back $1 holiday tequila shots, $5 margaritas and appetizers at your local neighborhood Applebees. Live the holiday dream! 

The ONLY EXCEPTION to this rule should be if you do happen to use your phone, you can ONLY read our awesome blogs. Deal? 

A penny for your thoughts notebook? Keep Notes!

Since, you’ve now hypothetically followed Lil Scrapyd$’s advice and tossed your moderately priced cell phone, “straight out your win-dow” where are you going to store all of your great business ideas sparked from your meaningful and hilarious conversations with friends and family during your allout bender at Applebees? Every action has a reaction, right? Or whatever my high school physics teacher tried to tell me - I wasn’t really paying attention but I did have a pretty epic farm on farmville. 

I digress, luckily for you we have advice specifically for this too. We recommend that you keep a pocket-sized notebook or notepad with you. 

Rocket science we know, and believe it or not, this is a great place for you to write down all of those new potential dating digits you earned for yourself at the Applebee's bar while on your way the restroom, you little flirts. 

Work Wasn’t Avoidable? Okay, Let’s Set a Timer

We wish we could tell you that this didn’t happen but the truth of the matter is sometimes work just can’t wait, leaving you with no other choice than to just get-er done. 

If you fall into this scenario we recommend first; take a few deep breaths, next let’s set a timer for 30 minutes a day and limiting your jobs to be done in that time frame. 

This will help with limiting work’s encroachment on your personal life and help you to feel less guilty for not going the extra mile to help your job to be done. 

Be In The Moment, Wherever/Whatever That Is

Trust us, we know dopamine-driven data behind most internet applications and work-based computing. We know it's way too easy to get sucked back into the matrix. So easy that most of the time you don’t even realize you’re absorbing other people’s stress through their own posts. Thank you social media, for reminding me at 2 a.m. while I’m scrolling on Facebook that I called Karen a horseface back in the 3rd grade after seeing a picture of her and her husband's brand new baby foal. Oh relax and lighten up, we’re just joking and made that all up for the sake of this article, probably. 

Solution: to help reduce unneeded emotional social media and other entertainment entanglement, make a mental goal to be present mindfully and physically whenever you find yourself. The older you will thank you for the great non-influenced social media memories of your holiday with your friends and families. 

In Closing

From our huge Monstrous Family, we hope you have a blessed and memorable holiday season with your loved ones. 

If you have any other ideas for other reasons of this blog on how to unplug please share them in the comments below.