Holiday 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

In less than three and a half weeks, I will fly to Las Vegas to cover CES. Because I’ve now done that 25 times, I know that I should have my schedule set by now–and yet I don’t, because I continue to get pitches and invitations for the gadget gathering.

And many of the 61 e-mails I received Thursday alone (going by a search for “CES” in the subject line of messages that aren’t replies to my own correspondence) came from publicists pinging me about possible CES 2024 meetings and happenings for the first time this year. And as long as people keep putting new CES possibilities before me, I have little reason to nail down anything but the broad outlines of my schedule for those four days in Vegas.

(That’s late morning of Jan. 7 through almost midnight of Jan. 11, if any tech publicists are reading this.)

I have little room to talk about other CES types being late with their plans. But the runup period that I’ve taken to calling CES Advent really does need a lid, to steal the political-journalism term for the announcement to reporters from a White House or campaign spokesperson that there’s no more news coming out of their shops for the day.

A set and announced date for everybody to get their pitch out to CES journalists would simplify planning in the same way. Alas, I’ve never seen the Consumer Technology Association call a lid on pre-CES announcements. So instead I’ll just say that close of business Monday is my own lid, and anybody who waits until after then to try to get a bit of my CES time or attention only has themselves to blame for my ignoring their pitch.

But considering that since I started writing this post, I’ve gotten another four CES pitches, that means I’ll probably have another 130 e-mails about the show to deal with by the end of that day. Then I’ll just need a 28-hour day to give me four hours of free time to pore over these solicitations and decide which ones might merit a spot on my to-do or to-look-for lists, if not an actual timeslot on my calendar.

https://robpegoraro.com/2023/12/14/ces-pitches-and-invitations-could-really-use-a-lid/

#calendar #ces #CESAdvent #consumerElectronicsShow #fullLid #LasVegas #lid #pitches #PR #schedule #techShow #Vegas