Over the summer months, many of us continue in business as usual mode with the same routines—reacting to our email and our calendars set by others’ agendas. We move along in our white pants and sunglasses, with one or two weeks of vacation thrown in for good measure. We often begin September feeling like summer came and went without much remarkable to differentiate it from the rest of our year, save some sweaty commutes and a couple of lovely beach days. Now with summer nearly half over (yes, startling, I know!), I’ve had some time to reflect and ask myself: 

• What am I planning to accomplish during this naturally slower paced time of year?

• Am I tracking toward achieving those goals?

• What will success look like? Will I feel I hit the mark as I regroup over Labor Day Weekend?

After I drop my girls off at day camp at 9 am, I wipe my brow and focus on these things that will make my summer months stand out as a short window of time with a big impact. 

1. Networking
Contrary to popular belief—summer is a fantastic time to reach out to former colleagues, contacts in your field, companies you’re interested in joining long-term—anyone who’s been on your “grab coffee or drinks” list for awhile. And if you don’t have that list, start creating it when you have some down-time (like right now!). The office has a natural slow-down feel while people collectively take vacation—allowing you to have more space to set up fun meetings to connect. Summer also brings out a more relaxed and open tone to these conversations that may not happen at other times of year. 

2. Planning
September through the end of the year is career and corporate crunch time. We’re tasked to: make or beat annual revenue, achieve or exceed professional development goals, spend all the money we were too busy or hesitant to spend throughout the year, and do everything we said we would do in January. By taking some of your summer hours to rework the plan, adjust the monthly targets and get creative about how to re-invest those extra dollars—you are setting yourself up for a fall where you can actually enjoy the changing of the leaves and get excited about the kids going back to school. 

3. Big Projects
You want to learn a new skill? Take a class. You want to write a short story? Block out the hours and write your first draft. You want to de-clutter the kids’ rooms while they’re at camp (very hypothetical, of course)? Get out those garbage bags and go to town. Choose one or two projects that you want to accomplish over the summer. They should be your top priority projects, the kind that when you visualize completing them—you get a physical feeling of relief. If you have ten big projects on your list for summer—go back and edit. Schedule the others for later in the year so you don’t simply cross them off the list. The goal here is not to make your summer chaotic and overwhelming—it’s to get something big and high priority accomplished so you feel like you took a leap in an area that’s meaningful to you. 

4. Vacation Strategy
I have already had my fair number of client calls this summer WHILE my clients were on vacation. They’re often doing some work while they’re out, but in most cases—not an overwhelming amount. Ironically, the fact that they’re not completely disconnected is stressing them out more than the work itself. For people with intense careers that they love, I like to flip the idea of vacation on its head and ask: What are the things you want to do this week that will make it feel like vacation? The answers may be read a novel, spend time with family, grill and eat dinner outside. Completely disconnecting may not be on the list—and that’s ok. Schedule those vacation gems in your days first and then if you need to check email once a day and take a couple of calls—make sure those things don’t interfere with your vacation gems. You get to create what a vacation means to you and once you do, you can use YOUR design as your go to approach. 

Most importantly—to make summer feel like a standout player in your year—make the most of these months by peppering your schedule with those summer-specific things that bring you joy. Outdoor movies and music. Rooftop bars with old friends. Playing hooky on a slow day without meetings. And of course, the beach. The beach. The beach.

You’re exhausted. You’ve been in back to back meetings all day and you finally return to your desk only to get that stomach pang. It’s 5:30 and you’ve done NOTHING on your to do list. How did this happen? For working parents, this productivity fail can result in evenings where you’re more connected to your phone than your kids while they’re awake—and then signing on to start your workday again after they’ve called you back to stall their inevitable slumber for the fifth time. Not ideal for anyone who wants something resembling a life! 

If you want to get your work done during the day AND be present for your family in the evening, pay attention—I’m talking to you! Here are some strategies that work for my corporate clients who are balancing career and family. 

1. Take a proactive approach to time
It’s time to commune with your calendar. It’s not your enemy, it’s your solution to getting your priority projects accomplished. To take a page from my longtime guru on time and life management – Stephen Covey, put “first things, first.” I’ve listened to the cassettes (yes, I said the c-word!) of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People more times than I can count—and it’s the primary reason I’ve been able to incorporate a writing practice into my busy life of being a small business owner and a mom. Identify your priorities, values and mission in work and life and make sure your calendar reflects them! I sit down with my calendar a month at a time and schedule in writing time one to two times a week. Then I schedule EVERYTHING else around those dates with my laptop and favorite writing coffee shop. 

2. Your new mantra: “Do I need to be in this meeting?” 
Now that you’ve identified your priorities, use them as your filter for when you answer this productivity make or break question. Be ruthless in protecting your time and saying no to meetings where your intuition is telling you: 1) It will be a waste of time, 2) Your input is not needed on this topic 3) You can give an opportunity to someone on your team to lead. If you have a hard time declining, try my approach to using The Inspired No. As much as possible, question the need for a meeting. There are times where it is necessary, but often times we set up time with others simply to hold ourselves accountable to deadlines or doing the work. What other way can you hold yourself and others accountable? If you’re a leader, set the tone that questioning the need for a meeting is ok. It can become part of the culture so that as a team, you can help each other protect your collective time. 

3. Kill the meeting to prep for the meeting
This may be controversial and I’ll put out the caveat that if you’re rehearsing for a presentation or pitch—there is a need for practice. That said, we have gone completely overboard in our abundance of “meetings for the meetings” and more often than not it can prompt employees to experience everything ranging from disengagement to outrage. Instead, how can you use tools like Slack or even email to assign roles for meetings and get feedback from colleagues on how the work is progressing? In my experience, the meeting for the meeting often occurs when there is a gap in leadership on a project., assignments are organized by committee and there is much time hemming and hawing over who does what and how to proceed. If you’re experiencing that gap in leadership, consider this as an opportunity to step up and run the show. While it may seem like you’re taking on more when you do this, you’re actually saving time by providing clear direction and a structure for your colleagues—cutting down on hours of hesitation and second-guessing. 

4. Run meetings with military precision
Meetings should have rules. Whenever possible they should be 30 or 45 minutes, max. Everyone should arrive on time. If they don’t arrive on time, you don’t restart the meeting when they arrive. In addition to everyone knowing what the meeting is about (I wish this was a joke), there should be an agenda and pre-work that MUST be read prior to the meeting. Everyone should show up with a pen and notebook. Personally, I find laptops in a meeting distracting, but I know this is becoming standard practice. If you’re trying to create a culture where there are fewer meetings and you have only a few times where you gather with people in person, I do think pen and paper facilitates better team interactions and dynamics than a room full of laptops—but that may be a question of style. There should be a clear leader of the meeting who will keep the discussion to the agenda and capture interesting topics that are not on the agenda to revisit at another time. 

5. Delegate like a boss
You don’t have to do it all yourself—especially when you have employees reporting to you! I see many leaders with teams, still struggling with delegating and the costs are clear—overwhelm and a lack of growth. When you stay focused on the junior tasks that could be growth opportunities for your direct reports, you cut off your own opportunities to expand your skills and expertise—not to mention your chance of being promoted. Even if you don’t have a team, (with the support of senior leaders) gain some leadership experience by mentoring a more junior employee on a project you’re working on together. You can practice training employees, handing off tasks and letting go of control. These are all necessary skills to both protect your own time and move to the next level in your career. 

6. Leaders: create office hours
If you’re in charge of a team and you all sit together in a small space, you may be the one who can always answer that question or give advice or coach—at any moment in the day. It’s exhausting and you can end up feeling like your time is not your own. One way my clients are able to protect their time is by creating office hours 2-3 times a week and communicating that this is the time to come over to discuss something in person. If they come over for a quick chat at other times, it’s up to you to kick them out of your cube—in the most respectful way—and redirect them to your office hours. You may want to post your hours somewhere to give your team the visual cue. 

While I don’t recommend implementing all of these strategies at one time, pick one or two to experiment with and see how much time you can create in your day! Begin the dialogue with leadership around the way meetings are impacting productivity and engagement for the team. These habits are deeply engrained in corporate cultures and buy-in at a senior level is necessary to make a change. Most importantly, practice disconnecting from work during those pre-bedtime hours with family. I know I’m not alone when I say this is hard and I’m not always good at it (and I do this stuff for a living!). Keep at it, re-focus every day, and when your 2nd job—otherwise known as evening crazy town—is as ridiculous as it usually is, try laughing. It truly gets me through. 

Last week I broke all kinds of records in my business. It was impressive! I medaled in procrastination, laziness and even binge-watching. You're welcome, Netflix! I stared at a blank screen that taunted me into frustration and shame. Then, as the last hours of Friday afternoon ticked by, I reviewed my week's accomplishments and requested of the universe a do-over. Knowing that was not going to happen, I took a walk instead. While taking in the beauty of the trees in spring bloom and the familiar sites of my neighborhood, I took time to reflect on where it all fell down on what should have been a perfectly viable five-day stretch. 

Here's what I picked up on my wisdom walk that not only shook me out of my funk but also gave me the idea for this post—creative bonus! 

1. You dumped it, but that's ok.
It truly sucks when we brush up against our humanity. Just when we think we're changing the world, creating work that moves people, delivering projects on-time and on-budget, we fall. And it hurts. After my triple-medal week, I had to look at myself and say, "It was not your week. That makes you a human, not a bad human." Acknowledging your "failure" and going a step further to accept it, neutralizes the situation in a way that helps you move forward. It could even bring you into a moment that connects you with others, knowing that you can't be the only one who experiences productivity fails! 

2. Do something that brings you joy.
This is counter-intuitive. My first instinct was to punish myself and continue to stare at the blank screen while I dodged the barrage of self-directed insults. But, at my core, I'm all in on the "F it" approach to intuitive living. When something feels like a struggle, do what makes you happy and see what happens. While this method was not wholeheartedly appreciated by my loved ones during my high school years, my long-standing practice has served me well. When I set out for my walk, my senses were hungry. I took it all in and it was exactly the peace I was seeking. I was flooded with ideas and explanations that reconnected me to my path. 

3. What can you learn? 
Once I was in a more accepting place, I was able to turn my rough week into an opportunity to learn what works for me and what clearly DOES NOT. What was different this week that could have thrown me off my game? I was slowly getting over a head cold. I gave myself four days to heal and I was NOT budging after that. I had to get back to work, right? It was just a cold. Because I was sick, I also took a nearly ten-day break from exercise. This did not work for me! I needed my release for both my body and my mind. I would have changed the game for my week if I re-set expectations. If I admitted that I was still sick, rested more and walked instead of going for my run, I would have been able to at least move my body—rather than sparring with my blank screen. What was different for you and how can you turn your productivity-fail into the answers you need to keep you on track? 

Most importantly, for all of this to work you MUST believe you can get back at it with renewed fervor and momentum. You MUST deposit your unproductive week into a distant past and re-commit to the things you need to put in place in order to get back to work! I say this as I sit in my favorite writing coffee shop at my best writing time with my most effective caffeinated writing fuel. I threw everything I had at this morning so I could crush any lingering doubts. And that, my friends, is how it's done. 

Perfectionism. You tout it on interviews as one of your greatest strengths. While hailing its name, you follow your kids around the house with a microfiber cloth and your favorite cleaner—Method Cucumber Surface Spray (been there!). You give it all the credit after delivering a project on time and on budget (without giving it the credit for hours of belaboring over emails and colors and words and serial commas not to mention what everyone on the team will think of the emails and colors and words and serial commas). It’s the reflection by which you measure your body, your relationships, your work and your joy. Yes, even your joy! 

We dutifully worship at the altar of perfectionism—but to what cost? How is perfectionism holding you back? Here’s a short list (that is by no means exhaustive) of the top areas of your life that are impacted by your perfectionist ways. 

1. Productivity
You may think that by telling your boss you’re a perfectionist, he’s going to give you a high achiever award. You’re wrong. What he’s really thinking is, “She’s never going to get anything done.” Among leaders, perfectionism is seen as a weakness and not a strength (so choose something else for that upcoming interview!). When you’re caught in the grips of delivering the unattainable—a perfect product or service—you can choose to make the perfection a priority over meeting a deadline, customer need or addressing a financial cost. This a lose-lose scenario that will dramatically impact your relationships and reputation over time. 

2. Confidence
“Never good enough” is the rallying cry of the perfectionist. In thinking and living this mantra, over time you can widdel your confidence down to a tiny, thirsty sapling. Its thirst is for praise and validation that only comes from external sources and when it does, it is deflected with self-criticism, so it is never truly satisfied. This damaged confidence hinders your ability to trust your intuition, thus you begin to second-guess your every decision and can be left paralyzed. 

3. Peace
How calm can you feel when negativity is jabbing at you all day, when nothing you do or produce feels worthy, when the thought of someone noticing the tiny hole in your sweater feels like the nagging pebble in your boot on a 12 mile hike? The answer is obvious -- and yet, we continue on this path where we believe we will find our peace and calm once we meet our goal of the perfect job or the perfect body or finding the perfect life partner. Then, we will deserve to feel peaceful! Well, sadly if this is your approach, you will be waiting an eternity or until that moment you learn that you can choose the peace you want to feel no matter where you are on the path to your achievement. In fact, I would say that it’s near impossible to achieve that thing without this realization and without a commitment to choose peace on the regular. 

4. Connection
Here’s a funny little secret: people are drawn to imperfection. Lucky for me, people tend to like quirky personalities! According to the sage Brené Brown, “Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.” The quirks, the flaws or as the late Robin Williams labels them in Good Will Hunting—the peccadillos—they make you interesting and relatable and memorable. When you try to hide those things under a thinly veiled perfectionist standard, you’re missing out on deeper connections and relationships that are frankly more fun! 

5. Love
Often times when we hold ourselves to an unattainable standard, we don’t stop there. We can hold our partners to this standard as well, and to better understand how this makes them feel, please see numbers 1-4, above. In a nutshell, it makes them feel unappreciated, unworthy and unloved. Harsh, yes, but also accurate. It’s a surefire way to get them to back off from being vulnerable with you, as you may have done with them in an effort to hide your own imperfections. When this happens on both ends it can mean the beginning of a distance that must be addressed before the gap becomes too wide upon which to build bridges. 

Are you convinced or are you still hanging onto your habit with a vice grip? I’m a fan of experiments that produce small wins. Choose one area of your life this week where you can practice letting go of your perfectionism and see what happens. My dad used to call those holes in his sweaters, “air conditioning” and it’s one of the memories of him that always makes me smile. What are your peccadillos and how are you going to turn them into your superpowers starting right now? 

Often when my clients come to see me, they know they want a career change. They know they’re craving something new, but they feel stuck. They’re exhausted and depleted. They’ve sandwiched our session between a presentation to senior leadership and the errands that are mission critical to running their home for the week (ie. picking up the kid who will be the last one standing at daycare, again). 

When I ask them, “What would you be doing right now if money and time were no object?”, I get a deer in headlights look in response. Not only do they have no answer, but they’re also furious at themselves for being this far along in their careers without knowing what they want to be when they grow up! 

Overwhelm coupled with an anvil of pressure to “do it all” is standing in the way of creative ideas about your next career move. When you keep pushing through the slog, you feel like a shell of your pre-kids self. Remember those (still Type A but) healthy dreamer people? They’re in there, I promise! They had hobbies and unscheduled time where they could disappear for a few weekend hours, be completely unproductive and it didn’t matter. In fact, after they had that time, they showed up to work the next day energized, alive and dare I say, brilliant. 

Let’s reconnect with that carefree-ish person and unpack your overwhelm with the Roles and Responsibilities Experiment I use with working parents:

Roles and Responsibilities Experiment: 
1) Its brain dump time, friend. Break out a piece of paper and create three columns: Work, Parenting and Household. 

2) For each category, write a list of the tasks you’re responsible for on a daily or weekly basis. For now, we’re going to focus on the Parenting and Household categories because my guess is that you do this type of exercise at work regularly. Don’t hold back…put it all on there. Gifts for friends and family take time to purchase. Lunches take time to make. Managing childcare, paying bills, budgeting, scheduling play dates—it’s all fair game and it adds up. This part of our lives is what I call—“The Third Job” and it often puts my working parent clients over the edge. 

3) Now that you have your list, put:

• a “heart” next to all of the tasks you love doing
• a “star” next to the tasks you think are a high priority in your life
• a “D” next to all of the tasks that could be candidates to delegate to your partner, your kids or someone you can hire if you have the means.
• an “S” next to all of the tasks you feel you “should” do, but you’re not truly connected to them. (This group has it’s own exercise that’s coming soon so hang on to it!)

4) Review your list and note what comes up for you. Are there any D’s and S’s on your list? IF NOT, REPEAT STEP 3! Don’t think I don’t know this trick! You’re holding onto control and that’s a surefire way to stay exactly where you are. If you want to move forward, you need to create space and that means letting go of some things. 

5) For those with partners, ask them to do the exercise as well. You can use this as a starting point for a conversation about shifting some roles and responsibilities. Last summer, I took on all of our personal finance tasks including budgeting, bill paying, investing and projecting annual expenses while my husband took on grocery shopping, meal planning and much of the cooking. It’s not perfect (and it will never be), but our kids are trying new foods and we’re more on top of our finances than ever before. It’s an exciting shift. 

6) If you do decide to shift roles, remember there’s a learning curve! You’ve been making lunches and managing the babysitter for years—give your partner some room to make mistakes and learn without judgment. Resist your instinct to take back control after one or two mistakes. When you say things like, “I’m the only one who can put the baby to bed.” you tighten your handcuffs and remove any chance of having a weekend away in your near future! 

As you begin to create space by removing your “should” tasks and delegating, start to fill that space with things that bring you joy. It’s in this time when you’re doing the things you love in the space that you’ve carefully guarded for only you, that you will begin to find clues about your next exciting career move.