20 small steps to an intentional summer

You can do a lot this summer with small things done consistently.

Photo by Aleksandr Eremin on Unsplash

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that for most of us, the academic year is over and summer break is upon us. The bad news is that it will be gone before you know it. As summer begins, consider how you want to feel when it ends in about 90 days: satisfied or regretful?

Fortunately, you can influence that outcome now. Even with work commitments, summer is an excellent time to focus on personal growth: your health, relationships, hobbies, habits, and your ability to enjoy life once the season concludes. This doesn't have to be costly or time-consuming. Following our philosophy of taking small steps within coherent systems, here are 20 things you can do this summer to significantly enrich both your personal and professional life.

1: Do a postmortem on your spring semester teaching and other professional activities

While the semester just ending is still fresh in your mind, do some critical reflection on what happened. Look back on your teaching (one class at a time), scholarship (one project at a time) and service (one committee at a time) and ask some questions such as: What went well? What were my biggest wins? What could have gone better? What were my biggest challenges? What should I change for next time? I like the “Stop/Start/Continue” model for this sort of activity. Block off some time, grab a notebook or a Google Doc, and write notes to your future (August) self about what just happened. Then, put a notification around the first or second week of July to go back and review before the new year starts. More about this at the end of the article.

2: Write a list of habits to develop or break (not goals to achieve)

Academics are goal-oriented, and it’s tempting to make a big list of even bigger goals to hit over the summer. These, like New Years Resolutions, rarely are entirely met. So instead of trying to tackle a ton of big goals this summer and possibly getting bummed out, why not work on creating good habits or ditching bad ones? Summer break is about three months long, which is perfect because it takes roughly that amount of time to form a habit (around 65-100 days). Habits are all about doing little things consistently, and with less work stuff to worry about in the summer, it's easier to keep up with those actions.

3: Read the GTD book

If you are reading this Substack, you’re seeing how the Getting Things Done approach to time, tasks, projects, and attention applies to academic life. But it is well worth it to take the time and learn the source material, from David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Don’t let the business-y jargon and buttoned-down look fool you: This is a book of central importance to every knowledge worker, including and especially academics. Read it over the course of 4-6 weeks and you’ll begin to see how all these pieces of GTD fit together. Maybe you’ll be like me circa 2005 and your life will be changed.

4: Set up a Waiting For list and a Someday/Maybe list

One of the most important parts of GTD is a pair of lists: Someday/Maybe and Waiting For. I wrote about the Someday/Maybe list at length here; it is a list where you put any idea that you’ve captured that you cannot get to at the moment, but you would like to do so someday, maybe. The Waiting For list is for tasks that need your attention but the ball is in someone else’s court: tasks you’ve delegated, email or phone replies you’re waiting for, reimbursements not yet received, and so on. Both lists relieve your brain of the responsibility of holding information that isn’t actionable at the moment. Summer is a perfect time to build the habit of using them, since it seems like we tend to have big ideas (for the Someday/Maybe list) at a faster pace and external commitments (Waiting For) at a slower pace. Even if you don’t adopt GTD whole-cloth, having these two lists in play can make a world of difference.

5: Do at least one thing on your someday/maybe list

Summer is not only a good time to make and start using a Someday/Maybe list, it’s also perfect for doing things on that list. The Someday/Maybe list isn’t supposed to be a junk drawer for good ideas. It’s more like an incubator or a parking lot. The intention is that you will, someday, get to more than a few of those items. Find ways to make “someday” this summer. For example, I have a bunch of local travel destinations on my Someday/Maybe and I plan on hitting more than one of them on some weekend trips.

6: Get to Inbox Zero

In its purest form Inbox Zero it refers to the state¹ of having literally no emails in your inboxes, because they have all been archived, filed into folders, or converted into tasks that go on a Next Actions list. This may seem like a myth or a physical impossibility, but it’s not. It just takes time, typically a single major investment of time to get your inbox to zero, and then a daily habit (see above) of keeping the inbox at zero, which is not very time consuming after the initial push. The benefits of Inbox Zero are numerous: You will be fully aware of the commitments that are lurking in those unread emails, everything will be in its proper place, and you will have the freedom to think about those things at a time and context of your choosing. And summer affords you the uninterrupted time blocks to get this done, even if the initial zeroing out takes multiple days, as it sometimes does.

7: Start doing Weekly Reviews

The central idea of GTD is the weekly review: a dedicated hour or two each week to engage with your system (calendar, lists, notes, projects). This involves cleaning, updating, clarifying work, planning the next week, and considering long-term goals. I do a weekly review every Sunday morning. It’s not effortless and it does require a time commitment. But the benefits to your clarity of thought and peace of mind are innumerable. There’s a lot more time to work with in the summer, and less to engage with, so it’s a perfect time to start this practice.

8: Organize your digital files with the PARA system

You might be spending time this summer organizing your kitchen or garage, so why not also organize your digital files? Done well, digital file organization can provide amazing clarity of mind. The best system I have seen for doing this, and which I use myself, is the PARA system, invented by Thiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. It involves setting up the same four folders in every context where you store digital files: one for Projects, one for Areas, one for Resources, and one for Archive (“PARA”). It’s a coherent system (remember we like those around here) and if you’re like me, you switch between multiple Google Drive accounts along with a OneDrive account and Obsidian, not to mention folders in Outlook and GMail. Having the same overall structure in all of these places is like adding 10 points to your IQ because you are no longer having to think about how one place is structured versus another. For more information, check out Thiago’s book or any of the million or so YouTube videos that have been made about this.

9: Figure out your high level horizons with a retreat

If you were reading this blog last summer you know that I took some time to critically examine… everything. Working through those issues involved clarifying my principles and purpose, which in GTD-speak we call the Horizons of Focus. At the center of the progress I made were two half-day retreats I took (at the local coffee shop) to focus on Horizons 3 through 5. I think it’s critically important, in this day and age of faculty burnout, for every higher education professional to come to terms with Horizons 3 through 5: Why you are here, your various roles in life (not just work), and where you want to be in 3, 4, or 5 years. Having answers to these questions, written in a document, will give you a blueprint for what to say “Yes” or “No” to and a basis for reconnecting with your core purpose when you need to do so. In the summer you have way more time for a retreat or two like this, than you have during the year.

10: Write a Life Plan

In particular, Horizon 5 has to do with your overall purpose on this planet. Take the time this summer to, if nothing else, get clarity on what you think your life purpose is, in terms of the various roles you play in your life as well as clarity on your fundamental principles and values that govern who you are. This is not mere navel-gazing. This is setting your course by the North Star. In this article I wrote in depth about how and why you should write a Life Plan. If you haven’t done this, now would be a great time. If you have, summer would be a good time to revise it, because like all courses, yours requires correction from time to time.

11: Exercise

No matter how intellectual we may think we are, we remain human beings in physical bodies that need to be maintained. Making time for exercise can be hard in the academic year, but it’s less hard in the summer and you can use the time to build a habit of exercise that can carry into the fall. The key is to start small but be absolutely consistent: For example, commit to walking two miles every day — a simple task which takes most people around 30-45 minutes — but then actually do it every day. (Or at least, don’t skip two days in a row.) By the end of the summer it will feel weird when you don’t walk daily. You will be a better professional, add more value to more people, and derive greater enjoyment from all of life for longer lengths of time, if your body is in better shape.

12: Observe regularly-scheduled times for wakeup and bedtime

This one sounds weird, but I think it’s important. In past summers, I’ve used the wide-open summer schedule to stay up later and sleep in longer, and with no plan in mind. Then, because my wake/sleep schedule had no structure, none of the other times during the week had structure either, and this is where opportunities for growth and activity can start to slip away. Plus, when the academic year starts, readjusting to the usual schedule is just brutal. I view having set times for waking and going to bed as an extension of exercise, above, and it’s key for giving yourself a reliable schedule for everything else on this list.

13: Practice scheduled times for a minimalist email contact

In one of my other articles, about email management, I wrote that one way to get email under control is to not use it all the time: Set aside times during which you will handle email, give it full focus during those times, and keep it shut down otherwise. Like a lot of other things on this list, it takes practice to build the discipline needed to do this (and not jump to your email every time it dings at you). If you start this practice tomorrow — say, by opening your email client only between the hours of 8-9am and 3-4pm, and it’s completely shut down otherwise — and stick with it, by August it will be your normal behavior.

14: Time box your week

Time boxing (or blocking) is the practice of scheduling, on your calendar, blocks of time during the week before the week starts (like, at the weekly review) devoted to specific tasks, projects, or areas of focus. During the academic year, we have time boxes made for us in the form of scheduled classes and committee meetings. The rest of the week is up to us, and this is what time boxes make systematic. Summer is a good time to get into the habit of time boxing, for two reasons. First, the unstructured nature of time in the summer makes it easy to fritter away time — if you’re not intentional about how you use it, it tends to be misused, and time boxes put a stake in the ground for the things you want to work on. Second, there’s a lot more time to budget and fewer responsibilities clamoring for it. You can combine this list item with others, for example by blocking off an hour every morning to walk 2-3 miles or setting up a one-hour block each day for email (and shutting off email outside that block).

15: Set up daily blocks for personal learning

Special case of the previous item: Be purposeful about setting aside time during the week for personal learning. Being academics, we’re not truly happy unless we are learning something ourselves, so indulge yourself. This doesn’t have to be any specific thing and can be totally unrelated to your discipline. It just has to involve deliberate, mindful, and effortful time spent expanding what you know. If you need a suggestion: Learning anything involving computers is always a good idea, and DataQuest.io offers 100% discounts for educators on their excellent self-paced courses in computer programming and data science.

16: Learn a new tool that you can use in teaching later on

A special case of the previous special case: Block off some weekly time to play around with tools that you can use in your teaching this fall. We often tell ourselves that we’ll get around to learning these, but don’t. You can change that now. I get a lot of value out of exploring the hidden depths of common software, like Google Slides or Excel. Or, if you haven’t played around with artificial intelligence tools, fluency with these is becoming more and more important. Or maybe book some time in one of the fancy classrooms on campus and figure out how to run the tech in it while nobody’s using it.

17: Set up daily blocks for “no work”

Another special case: Purposefully set aside time that is neither work-related nor learning-related, but just fun stuff that you like doing. We do not do this nearly enough during the academic year. It can seem like a waste of time, but in fact we need fun and diversion in our lives. You don’t have to be “good” at it; there’s a lot of value in having certain things in your life that you are not good at doing, nor do you intend to become good at them, but you like doing them nonetheless. The most recent such thing for me, is backgammon. I’m not very good at it but I have fun playing it on my phone, so I play a couple of games every morning. I know it sounds silly to schedule time, not to work — but we’re academics and that is how we do things.

18: Set up an end-of-day routine for the working day

There are no “working days” in the summer, right? But in the same spirit of providing structure for yourself in an unstructured time, at the end of each afternoon (or however you define your working hours) it’s good to have a quick routine to sum things up and signal the end of the day. Mine goes like this: Around 3:30 or 4:00pm, I zero out my inboxes, list three “wins” for the day, three challenges, three things I learned, one thing I am grateful for, and what I plan to do in the evening. It takes about 10 minutes, and it’s just another way to provide some intention to my time. And it’s easy to carry this habit over into the fall once you’ve built it.

19: Declutter your physical spaces

Primarily I am thinking about working spaces on this one, but it doesn’t have to be. Trying to clean your home or campus office during the school year is hard, a little like jumping onto a moving vehicle because you’re intensely using the space while you’re trying to clean it. The relative down time of summer makes it a lot easier to go in and remove trash, clean surfaces, collect and dispose of clutter (especially paper items that can be recycled), and more. You can apply the Clarify process to your physical space and make it a much more useful, calming place. For me, I really need to tackle decluttering and organizing my home office closet which has become a landfill of obsolete tech and plastic bins.

20: Make a startup plan for the fall halfway through the summer

Finally, summer lasts about 90 days, which will pass with astonishing speed. They always do. You can’t do anything about that, but you can prevent yourself from being surprised by it. Remember item #1 on this list, where you did a postmortem of your spring classes and set a reminder on it for July? The second week of July is roughly the halfway point of summer break. So book some time — a day, or a half day — to have a mini-retreat with yourself where you go back through your postmortem and then start making plans for August. Determine your projects that need to be complete for the fall, and set a schedule and timeline for getting those done. Connect your future plans back to your past reflections and your higher horizons. You don’t have to start working on your classes this early (I certainly won’t) but to prevent the moment of panic when you realize classes start in 2 weeks and you have nothing done, put yourself on a calm, measured, reasonable schedule for getting everything ready so you can coast into the fall, rather than crash into it.

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By integrating even a handful of these suggestions into your summer routine, you can turn the break from a period of potential stagnation to one of real personal and professional growth. Remember, the key is not to overhaul your entire life in 90 days, but to take small, consistent steps within a coherent framework. As summer draws to a close, reflecting on the progress you've made will foster a sense of satisfaction and preparedness, rather than regret, and you'll enter the next academic year refreshed, organized, and ready to tackle whatever challenges lie ahead.

1. Or, the process of getting to this state.