Stephen Robbins here. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Today's topic is having a holiday that's really a holiday. The quick and dirty tip is to put

barriers between you and everyone who might want your time. It's that special time again,

when we're getting to that family-oriented time of year,

when we all have lots of quality time together.

Although, depending on your family,

to make it quality, that time might be spent on separate continents.

No matter what, you want good life balance over the holidays,

otherwise your brain will explode from the stress of it all. Some people spend their playtime

obsessing about how they should be working, then they spend their work time fantasizing that

they'd rather be playing. This is not a recipe for happiness. Don't do it. When you're working,

work, when you're playing, play.

Pulling this off takes a gatekeeper. See, these days all our little connected mobile devices were supposed to give us work-life balance. They do, but only if we use them the right way.

If we let them become little interruption factories, they do make life a living heck.

When you're at work, you want to keep your home life at bay, and when you're at home, you

want to keep your work life at bay.

Here's how.

Pretty much every email service on the planet now offers vacation autoresponders.

These let you automatically respond with a message saying,

I'm not taking email at the moment, try me later.

As you know, from listening to my email on vacation episode, on holiday, set your

auto responder to say, I'm away right now and won't respond to your email, re-send it

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