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.