Got a summer vacation on the horizon? Is that horizon blue, curved, and punctuated by cruise ships drifting in and out of view? Wake up! You’re daydreaming about your vacation, but there’s work to do. We’re all for the psychological benefits of taking vacation days, but with visions of a sweet senorita writing your drink order in the sand, you may need to find new ways to focus.
Here are five tips to keep you humming along productively until you get that break your mind and body need:
- Download these productivity enhancing apps. Here are 5 applications you can download on your smartphone to reinvigorate your desire and ability to get things done:
- Pomodoro Timer – If you are losing focus, this app will help you regain it by forcing you to work straight through 25-minute intervals, before taking short breaks. This can increase your mental efficiency and time management.
- Things – This app organizes your inbox, to-do lists, meetings, and appointments, enabling you to prioritize projects and meet deadlines.
- Evernote Scannable – This app turns business cards into phone contacts, and enables you to scan any other important paper documents for access from your smartphone.
- Remember the Milk – Not a grocery list app (though you can use it for that too), this app is an impressive personal organizer that works across Google, Gmail, and Outlook. Use it to create to-do lists and efficiently get things done.
- Contractually – If your job involves a lot of phone calls, this app will keep track of your calls, let you know how long it has been since you last contacted certain contacts, and create follow-up reminders.
- Share your schedule with your supervisor. Hold yourself accountable to a superior by planning out how you will meet your deadlines with a vacation weeks or days ahead. Provide a written daily schedule for major projects and a countdown to your time off. Offer ideas for a Plan B, whenever it is likely that a Plan A could be put in jeopardy. Include arrangements for other employees to cover for you on projects, as necessary, while you are away.
- Be flexible and shift your priorities as needed. It isn’t just your own vacation time that makes it more difficult to be productive during the summer. You are also working with people who are taking time off, which means you can’t get in touch with people when you need them, and you can’t get answers and/or approvals. These circumstances force you to put projects on hold. If you can’t reach people, put Post-It notes on their monitors to ensure prompt call-backs when they return. Adapt to the changing schedules of your colleagues by planning summer work that relies less on others, if you can. Otherwise, prepare for the inevitable need to jump from one project to another, and do so without getting rattled or wasting time in transition.
- Be a super-organized version of yourself. Given all of the summer conditions that conspire to make you less productive, you need to impose greater discipline on yourself in order to counteract them. If you had been doing weekly to-do lists in the winter and spring, organize your priorities into daily to-do lists. Incorporate precise expectations for what you will accomplish each hour. Make sure that you schedule your most difficult projects at times when you have the most energy, and get your mindless tasks done during your after-lunch food coma.
- Find work when there appears to be none. The most obvious productivity killer is a lack of work being assigned to you. Use this opportunity to shine and show your company-first mentality. Be proactive! Prepare for future projects, get organized for greater productivity when your workload increases, and catch up on any loose ends you may have been neglecting.
Rarely does a supervisor accept the conditions of summer as a valid reason for procrastination or a loss of productivity. Yet, many employees seem to accept lower productivity from themselves during this time. “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” is no excuse to lag. As long as you are earning a paycheck, you owe it to your colleagues, superiors and company to be the most productive employee you can be – until you’re cruising to Margaritaville.