Rob PegoraroHoliday schedule overload remains an effective way to keep holiday spending in check
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.
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 cognitive load.
Plus, this time of year already has me feeling beseiged by CES PR pitches–and yes, of course I am going to CES in January because I’ve done that every January the show has happened IRL since 1998, but thanks for asking once again.
(As for the charities behind all of the “Giving Tuesday” pitches: Stop it already. 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.)
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 send out invoices. 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.
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. Like sometime in August.
#Advent #attentionSpan #BlackFriday #cartAbandonment #CESAdvent #ChristmasPresents #CyberMonday #executiveFunction #giftShopping #gifts #GivingTuesday #holidayPresents #ICanTEven #promotions #sales
Austin Huang ❤️
Kristen Baldwin
Musings of Ru