Throwback/redux: How not to waste the summer
Updated thoughts on intentionality as we stumble toward a break
Note about this article: This week’s post was going to be about how my hybrid analog/digital GTD platform, hinted at in earlier posts, was going. I’m going to eventually write about this, but honestly, the system is still evolving so much that I don’t think it’s fully ready to describe yet. So I’m saving that for another day, and instead signal-boosting a post that first appeared here in 2023.
Most higher education institutions have 4-6 weeks left in the semester, and it’s not too soon to start thinking about summer. Faculty spend summers differently. Some are knee-deep in research; some are teaching summer classes; some are taking extended breaks; some are a linear combination of the above, and some are none of the above. Whatever you’re into in summer, it’s good for your whole person-ness to approach it with a plan and with some structure, so as not to feel the crushing regret about wasted time, which so many of us experience right around July 15th.
That’s what this article was originally about back in 2023. Today I’m presenting it again with some updates along with some new stuff at the end.
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, for example exploring a new class we’re teaching in the fall or digging into research on a question that matters to us. 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”.)
Around July 1, We reach a point of no return in whatever it is we’re doing in the summer. You can see August on the calendar. If you haven’t enjoyed your summer by this time, you’re not going to. Instead, you’ll 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 work in our jobs, so we produce value for our institutions and serve students. And,
A commitment not to do work, so that we take care of ourselves and those we love.
These commitments are opposed to each other in the same way that your thumb is “opposed” to your forefinger. They are meant to act together and allow a range of useful motions in life. The only way to make these two commitments work with each other, is to make decisions about your time.
Making a decision is a tiny murder. In his 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.’” Those are words associated with death. 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 have an immediate commitment to those things.
Real decision-making in this sense is hard for academics. We are used to Doing All The Things. 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. We take Yogi Berra’s advice: When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
The key to having a summer that you can feel truly good about, is not being like the typical academic. It’s about making decisions — in advance — 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, and try not even to think, about the things you are not doing.
How to make decisions about summer stuff
Decision-making isn’t always easy. What makes it easier 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 involve creating a direct line of sight from your core values, to your long range plans, to your short range plans, all the way down to your projects and moment-by-moment tasks. Even in the summer.
You may think I’m about to follow this up with a detailed list of how I program every moment of every day during the summer. You would be wrong about that. I have tried that approach before and it never works either on a practical level or on a personal satisfaction level. Instead, in the summer, I follow four basic rules:
Make strategic decisions in advance (at Quarterly and monthly reviews) about what I want to accomplish, both work and not-work, on a big-picture level.
Schedule my time, on a loose and negotiable level, during each week and for each day to move incrementally toward the things I wanted to accomplish.
Give myself permission to modify, or completely throw out, that schedule if it fails to make sense in the moment.
For summer specifically: Schedule no more than 4 hours of “work” per day, and preferably do that work 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.
Long range planning is important. Rule 3 is important in an equal and opposite way: It realizes 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, and I trust myself to be smart about making on-the-fly adjustments if needed.
Rule 4 is summer-only (although I applied it on sabbatical last fall too). Back in 2023 I had so much work to do in the summer — David Clark and I were finishing the Grading For Growth book — that I never really had a chance to slow down and just enjoy life. I enjoyed working on the book, but that was basically all I was doing. So in 2024 I decided to stop taking on any new projects after April 1, so that I could clear the decks for summer and focus only on what sustains me outside of my career — music, physical activity, and reading. “Bass, beaches, and books” was how I formulated it. I managed mostly to stick to that mantra and that summer was transformative in ways I am still realizing. In particular, I did much better work at my job the next year because I was actually rested.
That summer I used a routine, which I have since kept during the summer, even though now I do have limited numbers of work projects that show up during that time. It 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 followed by lunch.
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 a few tasks as priorities to complete tomorrow, and tagging one of those as the MIT.
This routine doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t even work for me on a lot of days. And in any event, that should be taken as suggestions for how to spend time, not hard and fast rules. And this routine does not carry over into regular semesters. But it’s an intentional use of time that puts both work and not-work into each day. 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.
April 2026 updates to this
I made a few edits and changes to the original article, but I also wanted to add some new thoughts that have cropped up about this over the last three years for me.
One of those edits is the injunction that routines and plans are just suggestions for how you would like things to go. Sometimes life happens and the universe throws black swan events at you that defy all attempts at planning and all routines. This is to be expected if you are actually living. It also doesn’t negate the value of having a routine or a plan. I view routines and plans like this now as conversations with God about how I would like my day to go if He permits, and the kind person I would like to be as long as He agrees.
So we shouldn’t take the actual routines or plans too seriously, but we should take making of them very seriously.
But at the same time, it’s very important to give ourselves grace and room to breathe when those routines and plans and the goals we set don’t happen. This is a corollary to the Law of the Whole Person. You are the inextricable sum of your parts and more than that. So when a goal isn’t met or a routine isn’t followed on one particular day, or ever, it’s not a failure of you. It may be a sign of great success in your quest to be a whole person because you’re experiencing the unpredictability of life and not just sitting around the house watching TV. (See below for reference.) It may also be a warning light on your life that says there are blockers or issues that you haven’t noticed yet until the light just came on that need your attention. But there’s nothing wrong with you.
Etc.
Just one item in this section this time, and that is the musical source for the reference I’ve made above. This is a song that in some ways is the theme song for this blog and has been a lot to me over the years, especially as I get into the second half of my 50s.
Thanks Robert, especially for the bullet point Apr26 updates.