10 ways to make holiday shopping queues more productive and keep your sanity

‘Tis not the time of the year to go shopping… For the most part, I’ve avoided the shops. I did a major shop for Christmas dinner a week ago and am making most of my Christmas gifts. However, I still have a few fresh items to buy for tomorrow and a few gifts and I am dreading the queues so I made a list of things to do in holiday queues.

But first, one thing not to do:

Don’t stress too much about picking the right queue beyond obvious indicators.

The chances are that there will be other lines that move quicker as this video illustrates:

Instead, see queues as opportunities to have a break in what is often the busiest time of the year or use it to do any of the following suggestions:

1. Read the magazines (for free)

The stores that are the worst for queues like supermarkets and department stores, fortunately, also come with built in reading material in the form of magazines near the checkouts. Yes, most of them are trashy gossip rags so if you don’t find reading them a guilty pleasure, then see it as market research to better understand pop culture. I find there’s usually enough home and cooking magazines to keep me occupied in even the longest of queues.

Don’t feel guilty about reading these magazines and not paying for them. Magazines will often include estimations of eye-ballers at places like supermarkets in their circulation figures for advertising. It’s win/win really!

2. Daydream

There’s been some recent evidence to suggest that daydreaming is beneficial but there’s also evidence that warns of potential harms. I think it comes down to context and content. For context, daydreaming when you have something to get done is not usually very useful, but other than going slightly mad (and doing the rest of the suggestions in this post), there’s not much else to do when you’re waiting in a shopping queue so you may as well fit in a bit of daydreaming to reap its benefits. As for content, what you daydream about can make a huge difference to whether it is beneficial or harmful – I think daydreaming about the unattainable isn’t very healthy and just leads us to be unhappy with our lot. On the other hand, daydreaming about our achievable goals can be really motivating. Maybe then this should be called visualising rather than daydreaming. Sounds like a topic for a whole other post…

3. Meditate

A simple meditation to do when you find yourself stuck in queues or in public transport is to focus on your breathing. Just count the time it takes to breathe in, pause for a second and then count the time it takes you to breathe out, slowing this if you can (if you can’t, that’s fine – focusing on your breath is helpful enough). Try to breathe using your diaphragm (your belly should expand when you breathe in, not your your chest).

4. Contemplate something inspirational

If you have a notebook or a smartphone, keep a list of your favourite inspirational quotes. Choose one of them and think about how you can apply it to your life. Note down any thoughts you have in a notebook (which you should always carry with you) or your smartphone.

5. Observe the world around you, objectively

It’s pretty easy to get very subjective around busy times like the holidays – there’s nothing like bustling crowds to bring out the worst in us. A screaming child suddenly becomes a personal insult and pity for the suffering parents is in short supply. Waiting around in queues is a perfect opportunity to snap out of ourselves and view the world objectively. One technique is to imagine that you are a novelist or a film director and each person is a character. Imagine yourself in their shoes, what might their cares and worries be? It’s an interesting exercise and good way of snapping out of the general resentment of human kind that crowds tend to bring on.

6. Plan your day/week/month

If you’re really busy, you may have found that you haven’t had much time to properly plan all the things you have to do. And being really busy, usually means you have a lot of things to do. It’s easy to forget to buy something, do something or even to be somewhere. So see queues as downtime that you can use to check that you haven’t forgotten something in the rush.

7. Plan world domination

If you have your to-dos sorted, then use this time to think of the bigger picture. Think of your goals and how you could achieve them. This is more than just the visualisation or daydreaming in Step 2 – this is brainstorming! I always carry a notebook with me for just such a thing. If you can’t immediately snap into this frame of mind, then try one of the earlier tricks like breathing or contemplating something inspirational or the world around you to gain a little calm first.

8. Read a good book

Carry around a good book in your bag and by “good”, I mean addictive and compelling, not necessarily worthy of literary accolades. This needs to be something you can’t wait to get back to, not something you feel you should read but don’t really want to. Instead of getting all stressed out about which queue is the shortest, you’ll start choosing the longest queues so that you can get back to finding out if the butler really did do it…

9. Get through your backlog of article reading

This is particularly relevant for smartphone owners – make use of apps like Instapaper or Read it Later to save interesting online articles to read in queues. Load up your smartphone with PDF ebooks (just make sure that they are interesting) with an app like GoodReader. Or catch up on your RSS feeds with apps like Reeder and NewsRack.

If you don’t have a smartphone, keep a folder of magazine/newspaper clippings or print outs from the web to pop into your bag (or fold up in your pocket) for times like this.

10. Do your book keeping

Keep up with your holiday (or general) spending by using queue time to get down all the details. If you have a smartphone, there’s a whole heap of apps that let you record your spending and enter receipts. I use YNAB with the Desktop application but there are standalone apps like iXpenseIt or if you’re in the US, Mint comes with a free iPhone app.

If you don’t have a smartphone (or don’t want to use it), then you can keep a small notebook or a section in a general notebook dedicated for tracking expenses. Note down the basics like store, item details and amount and keep an eye on the running tally. Make a note of anything that is tax deductible. Not only will this help your book keeping later on, but it may also help avoid any impulse purchases if you are fully conscious of what you’re spending.

Categories: Productivity