4 Ways To Beat The Summer Work From Home Slump

Working from home may have been challenging over the past few months, but it’s likely going to become an even bigger challenge over the summer. To ensure that you’re able to stay productive this summer as well as not let work take over your life, try these solutions and see what works best for you.

Create a schedule.

Get the whole family involved in creating a schedule that clearly lays out when it’s time for work and when it’s time for play. This helps not only create boundaries between work and life for you, but also for the rest of the family. Be sure to include meal times on the schedule to prevent the dreaded desk-lunch from taking over your schedule.

Use the schedule as a guide, but don’t worry if you can’t stick to it perfectly. The aim of a schedule is to provide structure to the day, not add more stress to it. You simply want it to help create boundaries between working and living.

Make the most of either the morning or the evening.

Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, take advantage of the early morning or late night hours when things are quieter. Take this time to organize your thoughts and create a plan for the day. Draft up a to do list to ensure you won’t forget any important tasks and aren’t missing any deadlines.

Taking time to plan your day reduces stress and allows you to focus more intently on your work during the day. Rather than worrying about remembering what needs to be done, you’ll be able to just work and therefore be more productive. This in turn means improved efficiency, which ultimately means less hours working.  

Try time blocking.

With time blocking, you dedicate a certain amount of time solely to one task. This helps you stay focused on the task at hand and helps you avoid getting sidetracked too often. Email is an ideal task for time blocking as it’s one of the most frequent distractors during the work day. Give yourself 30 minutes in the morning, afternoon, and the end of the work day to batch reply to emails. For big projects, dedicate larger blocks of time to each component. For example, proposal writing for two hours, budget review for 2 hours, recap for 30 minutes.

Time blocking takes a bit of experimenting to find the right amount of time needed for each task as well as some getting to used to in terms of focus. It’s worth persisting even if you find yourself easily distracted when you’re just getting started. The more you do it, the more natural it will become.

Keep children occupied.

The kids have been home for a few months now, but up until recently they had school work to occupy part of their day. Now that summer is here, that last remaining bit of structure to the day is gone with nothing to replace it. For older children who don’t need constant parental supervision, try some of the following tips. For younger children, you might want to check out a service that offers virtual babysitting. This is a new service that’s popped up in the past couple of months where licensed caregivers have created activities that they can do virtually with children while their parents are working.

For older children, get them involved in activities that are self-sustaining. Designate quiet times where they can choose to do an activity like reading, putting together a puzzle, learning to code, drawing, or anything else that doesn’t require parental supervision. The older the children, the longer these quiet times can be. Remember that no matter what, kids will always find a way to say they’re bored, so don’t worry if this becomes a daily utterance.

At the end of the day, give yourself some leeway. These are trying times and no one is perfect. Do your best to take care of yourself and establish boundaries between work time and living time, and you’ll be well on your way to beating the summer work from home slump.