Six ways to save time during the holidays

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Thanks to Safeway for sponsoring this post! All thoughts are my own.

I love the holidays, but they also can be a pretty hectic time. I’m always trying to squeeze in all of the holiday parties, gift shopping, holiday blog posts, traveling, and spending quality time with friends, my family, and Omied’s family for the holidays. It can be kind of a lot! So I’ll take every opportunity I can think of to save time during the holidays (and let’s face it, year round). Here are a few ways to save time during the holidays:

Six Ways to Save Time:

Safeway Grocery Delivery – Grocery shopping is probably one of my least favorite things to do, especially when I’m super busy. Particularly in the city, grocery shopping can be a whole thing that involves tough parking and long lines. Fortunately, Safeway has a couple of options to save time here, including their Drive Up & Go service and a Grocery Delivery service. For me, the biggest time saver is using the Grocery Delivery service since I don’t drive a ton in San Francisco. You can quickly order groceries on the app and schedule your grocery delivery during a one-hour time slot. It couldn’t be easier, and it’s the closest I’ve come to having my groceries magically appear on my front porch. Convenience from my local grocery store means less time spent grocery shopping and more time spent with friends and family this season.

Safeway (or your nearby retailer) is offering some great deals so you can do the same:

• New Customers: Receive $20 Off + FREE Grocery Delivery on your 1st online order
• If you’re a returning customer, remember to use time-saving services like Drive Up & Go at your local store or Grocery Delivery!

I purchased these products and more at my local Safeway, but you can also look for Drive Up & Go and Grocery Delivery services at many Albertsons Companies family of stores including Albertsons, Lucky, Pavilions, Randalls, Tom Thumb, Vons, and Pak N Save. Click below to check out the available services at your local retailer!

Meal Prep – Having friends and family in town for an extended time can add even more stress to the holidays. Casseroles or pressure cooker recipes can be prepared ahead of time and are easy crowd-pleasers (and time-savers). Even if you’re just cooking for one, making a big batch of a dish or two on Sunday will make eating a breeze throughout the rest of the week.

TSA Pre-check – The holidays are the most hectic time of the year for travel, so get yourself and your family set up with TSA Pre-check so you can skip the lines and the stress. TSA Pre-check means you’ll get to enjoy a shorter line and breeze through security without taking your shoes off or liquids/laptops out of your bag. Which means not having to arrive at the airport quite as early to stand around—hooray!

Do Secret Santa and/or donation gifts – Cut down your holiday shopping list and start a new tradition with your family. Instead of having everyone buy a separate gift for each and every person, set up Secret Santa. You can also suggest family members make donations to some of their favorite charities on behalf of the rest of the group (which is just an easy click away). You’ll eliminate having to run around finding gifts for everyone and can focus on one gift for your Secret Santa gift receiver (while you’re at it, do your holiday shopping online to save even more time). The fam can feel great knowing that donations have been made to some of their favorite causes. My family started scaling back the amount of physical gifts we give to each other and opting for more donations instead, and I honestly don’t miss the piles of presents and instead feel grateful that we’re all together and able to donate to causes we care about.

Make and freeze cookie dough – My mom is heavy into baking cookies during the holidays, sometimes making eight different kinds to share with friends and family. Over the month of December, she’ll make the cookie dough weeks ahead of time and freeze each dough. Then, a few days before the holidays, she’ll bake them all and we suddenly have dozens and dozens of deliciously fresh cookies. I’ve always thought this was such a smart cookie time management practice, and it makes it much more easy and manageable to bake a ton of  cookies.

Order holiday cards online – Everyone loves receiving holiday cards, but sometimes it can be hard to get it together in time to send out your own! Use an online retailer to create and send your holiday cards. There are a lot of sites out there that make it so easy to pop in a photo to one of their beautiful templates, and upload a spreadsheet of addresses. They’ll print the addresses on the envelopes for you, so all you have to do is seal them and drop them in the mail!

Those are my favorite ways to save time, but I’d love to hear what ideas you have for saving time during the holidays!

Loving this ways to save time feature? Take a look here for more of my lifestyle favorites!