Summer Success

What’s the best way to use any downtime you have this summer? Consider the Five Rs of Summer Success: rest, read, review, recalibrate, and re-engage.

“Summertime, and the livin’ is easy….” That may be how the song from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess goes, but it isn’t how modern life seems to be. There was a time when we could count on clients being on vacation for chunks of the summer. This resulted in an easier pace for us. That’s not as much the case nowadays.

That said, there usually is more of a sense of ease in the summer. This is partly due to the longer stretch of sunlight each day, which makes more leisure activities possible. Plus there may be actual vacation time to look forward to.

If you are able to slow down a bit or even step away from work for a while, how should you use your found time? Here are some ideas to consider:

Rest

If you have school-age children, the academic year can feel like a relentless march through activities and deadlines. Add to that the demands of work and you’ll likely find you’ve shortchanged yourself on sleep. Unfortunately, this has a cascading effect of multiple bad consequences.

My plan this summer is to do a reset on sleep. I know you’ve seen the latest science on the importance of getting a good night’s sleep. It affects everything from your ability to cope with daily life to possibly avoiding a range of diseases. So a sleep reset is worth the effort.

Read

We read all day. But how often do we actually read a book? Summer is a great time to immerse yourself in a long-form read. Why? It’s good for our brains and our spirits to step away from info-snacking and doom-scrolling. By reading in longer rather than shorter stretches we expand our attention span and create space for our brains to do the necessary work of connecting the new information to what we already know. This is how our usable knowledge grows. Better still, creating this space allows the brain to get curious about related new ideas. This curiosity leads to exploration, learning, insight, innovation, and competitive advantage.

Review

Last December I wrote about the value of doing a year-end review. Several of you responded by telling me how helpful the exercise was. Now at the midpoint of the year, it’s a great time to do a mini personal review. How have the first two quarters played out against your plan for the year? Are you on track to achieve what you wanted for yourself? Or have you discovered you’ve been on the wrong track all together? Doing this mid-year review will give you a more realistic sense of what should be possible by December.

Recalibrate

Now that you are in a more rested state and able to view life more objectively, take the results of your mid-year review and any new ideas harvested from your long-form reading to reassess your activities to date and your goals for the year. Do you need to recommit and double down? Do you need to recalibrate? What changes make sense for you now?

Re-engage

Here comes the good part: identify the next best step you can take to put your recalibrated plan into action. Even a small step in the right direction will help you generate some momentum and confidence in yourself to accomplish your plan. This is a great way to re-engage with work life after a summer break.

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I hope this is a summer of rest and revitalization for us all. That’s my idea of summer success.

Resources:

[Photo Credit: Eirik Uhlen]

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