Summer Refresh

One of our favourite times of year is when the sunshine starts beaming a little warmer and the outdoors is calling our name. Where we live, we spend half the year buried under a blanket of white and weeks (and sometimes months) in extremely chilly weather. By the time summer starts to come around, we are itching to get outside and soak up that Vitamin D!

The last thing we want to be doing is spending our entire summer in our office – unless your office is outside. Building your business means that you may not be able to take some significant time off, or any time, depending on where your business currently is at. To help you organize your schedule so that you can enjoy some downtime over the summer, here are a few suggestions:

Plan your schedule: depending on what type of business you run, at the beginning of each week plan for a chunk of time to be in vacation mode. This can be a few hours, an afternoon, or even an entire day if you can swing it! We like to block out a couple of hours mid-week where we can unplug and unwind, allowing us to recharge. But put it into the schedule or it’s very likely to get pushed aside.

Move your office outdoors: If you can, take your work outside whenever possible! We like to batch our tasks and when it comes to things like email management, social media content creation / scheduling, we bring it outside. It’s a great change of scenery!

Automate whenever possible: pre-scheduling things like your social media, blog posts or podcast episodes in advance eliminates tasks that will need to be done over the summer. It does mean a lot more work upfront but the payoff is well worth it!

Delegate: if you have other members on your team, or a VA, unload as much as you can off your plate. Even if you can’t delegate everything, a significant decrease of your daily tasks means you are able to relax and recharge with less worry.

Plan your reading schedule: pick up a few books that you’ve been wanting to read and aim to get through them all over the summer. We plan ours for the entire year, with a goal of reading one book a month. This doesn’t change over summer and we generally plan on reading more over the summer. Having a few books on hand can actually trigger some content ideas, too, so it’s beneficial not only to you, but your business!

Find your headphones: Not into reading? Find (or buy!) some headphones and plug into some podcasts or audiobooks. We’ve included a list of some must-listen podcasts below.

Schedule a “Fun” day: fundays aren’t reserved only for Sundays! We encourage you to schedule a day where you do the things you ENJOY, at least once a month. While this may look different this year, there are still many activities that can be planned. Go for a long walk somewhere new, grab some ice cream or coffee at a new coffee shop – just enjoy time with yourself or others.

As promised, here are some podcasts we are loving (in no particular order!):