Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to set your summer hours. Work might look a little bit different in the summer, and that's okay. It's better to be mindful of it and acknowledge it than to set expectations that won't work with reality. So after Memorial Day, some companies switch to what are known as summer hours.
Generally, these are shorter half days on Fridays are common, and I view them as a nod to reality. The opportunity cost of working into the evening just feels different. When it's light and nice out. People want to be out in parks and restaurants and such. They want to leave for the beach on Friday afternoon. You can have resentful employees watching the clock and sneaking out, or you can seem magnanimous, build it in and get the exact
same amount of work out of your people. Even if you work for yourself, though, there are just certain summer realities. Many of us have different childcare situations than we do during the school year. We might have more days off or half days because of out of work commitments. Colleagues might be gone, which slows things down to If that is the case, it might help to decide on summer
hours so you can set your expectations accordingly. If you might normally be able to tackle two projects in a week, but that assumes a forty hour work week and you wind up working thirty hours in the summer, you are going to feel behind. But if you know that you are working those summer hours, you might set the timeline as eight working days for completing those two projects rather than five days, and you'll wind up feeling a lot better about it. Setting summer hours can also give you
permission to relax. You might not be getting much done on Friday afternoons anyway, but if you do have control over your time and you decide that work is done at two pm on Fridays, then you won't feel bad about reading a book or going for a walk at three pm. The key realization here is that if the work isn't getting done anyway, it's best to spend the time on something worthwhile rather than just puttering around. Now.
I know that not everyone can set their own hours, and some people are busier over the summers, but if you've got a different slow season, then by all means, set winter hours or fall hours or whatever it happens to be for you, and if nothing else, you might try setting a true ending time during the summer. Many people who don't get paid by the hour drift out of work at various points based on when they think it is acceptable, or when their boss leaves or whatever.
So go ahead and set your forty hours and stick to it and see how it goes. You might find that you are getting just as much done and that you like having the boundary when you get outside and explore those summer nights. Do you have summer hours. I'd love to hear about how they differ from your work hours in other seasons. You can let me know about it at Laura at Laura Vanderkam dot com. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Hey, everybody, I'd love to hear from you. You can send me your tips, your questions, or anything else.
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