How not to waste the summer

Or, the power of being decisive when you don't have to be

Photo by Raphaël Biscaldi on Unsplash

Summertime in academia. It's what we look forward to all year long, but when it gets here we don't seem to know what to do with it.

On the one hand, it's summertime and our natural instinct it so use the time for rest, travel, reading for pleasure, and lots of other fun things. On the other, we still have work to do. Some of that work is also fun, relatively speaking, for example catching up on reading articles or doing exploratory work towards planning Fall classes. Other kinds of summertime work are not as fun, but we deferred it into the summer because of a perception that we "have the time" during the summer to do it but didn't "have the time" during the school year. (Which might be more about work avoidance than it is about not “having time”¹.)

We're fast approaching a point of no return in the summer (I think it’s around July 1, when you can see August on the calendar) where if you haven't enjoyed your summer yet, you're not going to. Instead, you'll be on track to regret that you neither rested as much as you needed, nor got as much done as you'd hoped. It's a sorry state to be in. How can we avoid it, and approach summer so that we're happy with the work we are doing and the stuff we aren't doing?

Decisions and commitments

In the summer, and in the rest of the year, we're balancing two commitments that seem opposed to each other:

• A commitment to doing good, satisfying work in our jobs, so we produce value for our institutions and serve students. And,

• A commitment not to do work, so that we produce value for ourselves and those we love, and sustain ourselves as human beings.

These commitments are opposed to each other in the same way that your thumb is opposed to your forefinger. They fit together and allow a range of useful motions in life. They are both important facets of how we find meaning as people in academia. Favoring one over the other leads to dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

The only way to make these two commitments work with each other, is to start making decisions about your time.

In his great book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman writes that "the original Latin word for ‘decide,’ decidere, means ‘to cut off,’ as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like ‘homicide’ and ‘suicide.’" When you make a decision to do something, you are also making hundreds of decisions not to do other things at the same time. You are, in a sense, putting those other options to death. Or at least, you're killing off the notion that you will spend the next hour doing anything else beside the thing you've decided to do.

Real decision-making in this sense is hard for academics, who are used to Doing All The Things; and the typical academic is terrible at it. When presented with the opportunity to make a decision, the typical academic will abide by Yogi Berra's advice: When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Confronted with a decision to make among three options, the typical academic will try to do all three, at one-third the level of investment. The concept of opportunity cost is simply not in their vocabulary.

The key to having a summer that you can feel truly good about, is not being like the typical academic. Instead it's about making real decisions about what you intend to do with the time you have, which are simultaneously decisions about what you are not going to do, and then commit to your intentions and don't worry, or even think, about the things you are not doing.

How to make decisions about summer stuff

Decision-making, and paying the opportunity cost of making decisions, isn’t always easy. What makes it possible is having a direct path from your personal values, to your big-picture goals, and then to an allocation of time on the small scale. In other words, decisions about how to use time in the summer, or any other time of the year, are about intentionally aligning what you do from one hour to the next with a larger set of goals that are themselves aligned with what sustains you as a professional and as a human.

For me, this intentional approach to summer comes down to four basic rules:

1. Make strategic decisions in advance (for example using OKRs and monthly reviews) about what I want to accomplish, both work and not-work, on a big-picture level.

2. Schedule my time during each week and for each day to move incrementally toward the things I wanted to accomplish.

3. Give myself permission to modify, or completely throw out, that schedule if it fails to make sense in the moment.

4. For summer specifically: Schedule no more than 4 hours of "work" per day, preferably in the mornings.

With the exception of Rule 4 this is exactly the same approach to work that I have every other time of the year: Use yearly, quarterly, and monthly reviews to develop large scale goals, then narrow them down at each weekly review to goals and daily actions so that every day, every week I am moving little by little toward my large-scale goals.

Rule 3 is an equal and opposite recognition that while schedules are useful, living by a rigid schedule is a drag, and sometimes things come up that are more urgent, or more interesting, than the things you planned. Tactics change and life happens, so I trust myself to be smart about making on-the-fly adjustments if needed.

Rule 4 is summer-only, and new to me this year. The last few summers I have been way busier than I wanted because of commitments to teach, speak, and work on books. This year I wanted it to be different. So I made a commitment back in January not to take on any new work projects between May and July with only a few exceptions², and instead focus summer on what sustains me outside of my career, namely music, physical activity, and reading. I have said "no" to almost every request for a meeting, collaboration, or speaking engagement during these three months. The language I've used to say "no" is simple and truthful: Thanks for your request. I'm afraid I need to decline, as I am not taking on any new projects until August. (And then maybe suggest someone else they might contact.) I don't typically explain why, because I don't need to. "No" is a complete sentence.

To complement these rules, I've set up a routine, which is basically a list of pre-made decisions for how to use my time, for each weekday:

• 6:00: Wake up and make coffee.

• 6:30: Read for half an hour (often 15 minutes each in two different books).

• 7:00: Write for half an hour. Doesn't matter what. Just write. Aim for 1000 words unedited.

• 7:30: Work on the most important thing (MIT) for the day.

• 8:00: Stop and shower.

• 8:30-10:30: Time to work, using 30-60 minute time boxes on tasks or projects that need attention.

• 11-12: Exercise.

• 1:00-2:30: Practice bass guitar. (And I have a schedule for that as well.)

• Then from 2:30 onward I just play it by ear, which is OK because all the stuff I “need” to do has been done. If I want to binge 3 hours of a TV show, for example, or go out to the beach with a book, I can do that without feeling guilty about what I “should” be doing instead.

• Before bed (which is 10pm for me): Spend 15 minutes planning out blocks of time for the next day, designating 4-8 tasks as priorities to complete tomorrow, and tagging one of those as the MIT.

This routine won't work for everyone. It doesn't even work for me, some days. And definitely this won't continue into Fall semester.

But it's an intentional use of time that puts both work and not-work into each day -- and this intentionality is necessary if we want to have both "work" and "fun" not only living side by side in the summer, but actually supporting each other. It is the key to not having the summer blow past you without really every enjoying it. And, it’s never too late to start — as long as it’s not August.

Tool Time

I'm starting a new feature today where I highlight an interesting tool that might be of use in helping you manage your stuff better. Let me know in the comments if this is helpful.

I'm a big fan of kanban boards and using them to track tasks and manage projects³. If you like them too, or you clicked that link and are looking for a simple way to try them out, TaskSpace might appeal to you. It’s a very simple browser-based kanban board system that’s free to use (although there is a paid tier that allows you to sync your data). Because it runs in a browser, there’s nothing to install and it works on any internet-connected device.

Once you log in you are presented with a kanban board with four columns (Backlog, This Week, Today, Done) which you can rename if you want.

You can add tasks/cards to a column by clicking +New Task at the bottom, and move a card from one column to the next just by dragging it. You can add "categories" -- a label that can stand for any meta-information you like -- and filter tasks by selecting the categories. (It's a lot like Trello used to be, before its plugin ecosystem started causing it to become bloated and expensive.)

A simple way to use Taskspace for managing to-do items would be to leave the default labels on the columns, then each to-do item would get a card that goes in the Backlog column. And each card would get a Category assigned to it that corresponds to either a project that it belongs to, or a particular context that it needs (for example “Home” or “Computer”). Then at your weekly review, decide which tasks you’ll focus on this week — keeping those limited to a dozen or less — and move them into the “This Week” column. And then each evening, decide which of those will be your focus for the next day — and move those into the “Today” column. And if you are focusing in on one particular project, or are in one particular context, use the buttons along the bottom row to filter out only the cards that are in that project or context.

Taskspace probably isn’t the best tool for a full-on GTD implementation as it lacks functionality that really makes it work for this. For example, tasks in GTD really need to be labelled with both context and project so you can filter on both; but you can only add one category at a time. (And you can only have four columns max, so relabeling the columns to correspond to contexts probably won’t work.) But for someone just needing a very simple, visually attractive, and minimalist tool for managing tasks, Taskspace might be just what you were looking for.

1. I’m putting that phrase “having time” in scare quotes because it’s misleading. Nobody “has” time. It is not a thing that we can possess, or even manage. It’s just part of the universe we live in, and we can’t “have” it any more than we can “have” gravity. So instead of talking about having time, or finding time, etc. we’d be better off talking about how we map our commitments onto time.

2. When I say “a few”, I mean very few and only those that are necessary. One of my speaking gigs for March got postponed to July, for example. I needed to finish up a research study that used final exam data. I did a panel discussion at the summer Grading Conference. I’ve had 2-3 meetings related to my President’s Office work. Next month I’ll need to start working on two workshops I’m giving in August. Other than that… that’s all, and it’s a “no” to everything else.

3. For example I use a kanban board with my students to track the status of graded work, which has all but eliminated emails about “When will you have X graded by?”