Rob Pegoraro<p><strong>Holiday schedule overload remains an effective way to keep holiday spending in check</strong></p><p class="">At least 300 messages with “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday” somewhere in their content have hit my Gmail inbox over the last 10 days. That should have meant I’ve gotten a vast amount of holiday shopping done, but instead I have a handful of abandoned online shopping carts in which the prices of most items have increased over the last few days.</p> <a href="https://robpegoraro.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/tempimage8mpo2b.jpg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a> <p>Retailers in the U.S. deciding to barrage their customers with quickly-expiring promotions on this weekend must work for most of them, but in my case it always leaves me feeling overwhelmed, probably more so than it did a decade ago. There are only so many e-mails I can deal with in a day, and spending the last 10 years overindexing on social media cannot have helped my ability to balance <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">cognitive load</a>.</p><p>Plus, this time of year already has me feeling beseiged by <a href="https://robpegoraro.com/2023/12/14/ces-pitches-and-invitations-could-really-use-a-lid/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">CES PR pitches</a>–and yes, of course I am <a href="https://robpegoraro.com/2014/12/12/why-yes-i-did-get-your-ces-pr-pitch/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">going to CES</a> in January because I’ve done that every January the show has happened IRL <a href="https://robpegoraro.com/2017/01/08/things-i-have-learned-from-20-years-of-ces/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">since 1998</a>, but thanks for asking once again. </p><p>(As for the charities behind all of the “Giving Tuesday” pitches: <a href="https://robpegoraro.com/2023/11/30/having-a-case-of-the-cyber-mondays-and-the-giving-tuesdays/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Stop it already</a>. Please move that effort to the Tuesday after Christmas, when those donations will land on credit-card bills a month after the costs of the holiday-shopping binge.) </p><p>This year, I’ve also had two longer-form projects spilling over into my schedule weeks after I should have completed them or at least pushed them far enough along to <a href="https://robpegoraro.com/2022/07/01/the-bureaucratic-burden-of-telling-clients-pay-me/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">send out invoices</a>. I got one past the copy-filed milestone Thursday, while another remains in a high-maintenance stage of editorial interaction. I don’t see how both won’t occupy much of my short-attention-span attention over the next two weeks.</p><p>And that’s why this is yet another December where I belatedly realize that I should have set my deadline to finish holiday shopping much earlier. 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