We've had a long tradition at Hammock of closing the offices from Christmas Eve until the day after New Years Day. But this year, the calendar (those Thursday holidays) and the challenge of hitting several closing dates have caused us to slightly alter our tradition by shifting it a day backwards. We'll be working through 1 p.m. on Christmas Eve -- and have even decided to provide heated offices that day (sorry, I just had to throw in that Dickensian reference).

We will then (officially) be closed until Monday, January 5.

I added the word "officially" because there will be people in the office on most of those days due to two factors, one of which is not how much people love the office. 1. Despite several months of planning for the holiday break, this year we've had some work appear that will require a skeleton staff (oops, more Dickens) to stay busy. 2. Some of us love to use that week to catch up on all of those "things we'd love to do if we only had the time" projects.

For instance, we have another blog and an email newsletter here on Hammock.com that we've had on the runway for nearly two months, about to take off. I'm going to address those during the quiet time between Christmas and January 5.

And, as a GTD person (Getting Things Done is a personal productivity system), I've got some "read and review" items (a category I use for dealing with items that are not critical but that I'd like to get around to one day), that I'm looking forward to finally being able to actually read and review.

This year, there will be no travel for my family. As my children are both away at school, they've decided that staying home is the travel they prefer. So we'll be seeing movies and playing tennis (indoors, of course) and watching entire series of TV shows in marathon sessions.

So, bottom line: I'll be around. Easy to reach and not really going off the grid.

However, I plan to be productively unproductive.

I have many resolutions each year. However, I've discovered the ones I keep tend to be rather absurd. For example, in 2008, my resolution was to link to more stories about flying cars. In reality, that was a resolution designed to help me learn about using some new search techniques to track off-the-radar topics.

Recently, I wrote a blog post about adults learning to play musical instruments. I have plans on doing that one day. Not in 2009, however.

Resolution #1: I'm going to attempt to record a short video each day. Most will be screencasts (video screen grabs) that I will post on SmallBusiness.com or a new blog here on Hammock.com called The Conversational Media blog. Others will be fun or random things designed to help me learn more about shooting and editing video with great speed.

Resolution #2: I plan on playing tennis at least twice a week. I used to play at least 3-4 times a week. And then, for the past ten years, I've played little. I started back playing in August and have discovered I enjoy it more than ever. This shouldn't he a hard resolution to keep.

Resolution #3: I hope to read at least 30 books in 2009. I probably came close in 2008, but I wasn't really counting.

Resolution #4: I'm going to work harder than ever to make sure as many people as possible know how talented the folks at Hammock are -- and how passionate we are about helping our clients succeed.