Living Through Some Summer Haze

The summer is drawing to a close. There’s a chill in the air in the morning. The midday sun isn’t quite so hot. And I’m seriously behind on my blog! Time to snap out of that summer haze.

My approach to the summer was to make the most of it. At least the non-working portion of the summer. I succeeded in that regard.

But I’m here to muse on being productive (ironically).

Before I go on I need to return to my last blog for an interesting tale. I’m easily amused so I feel the need to share such things. Last time I wrote I talked about opening a house to let the public pick through it and lighten the clean-up load. I joked about finding treasures in the house. Curiously enough, shortly after the clean-out I was showing it to a potential “work for equity” buyer and they spotted a bag of money in a closet. Seriously.

It was a small bag of silver coins (yes, there was actual silver in our coins 50+ years ago). It wasn’t a bag of hundred dollar bills, but hey, it’s the first bag of money I’ve ever found in a house! That alone is pretty exciting. But to know it hid there through a hundred people specifically combing over the house looking for things to take (my “free stuff” open house), that’s actually kind of amazing. So anyway, there’s proof that there is (occasionally) a bag of money hidden in that old dump you’re looking at!

Now where was I? – summertime.

I recently returned from the beach where I truly tried to avoid all work. I did a mostly good job of that. Certain things like a few phone calls and emails seem to follow you wherever you go. Dropping my phone in the bay midway through the week did help a little bit though. Yeah, that really happened. And no, a bag of rice couldn’t dry that sucker out! It’s okay, that phone was all scratched up anyway from the time I dropped it off the motorcycle and a car ran over it.

Moving on.

So you might think I’d wish every week was a vacation week. Not so. I wish every week was the week before vacation. I got so, so much done the week before vacation. Have you ever experienced this phenomena? You manage to pack all sorts of high-end productivity into the last few days before leaving for vacation. It was fantastic. I was on fire – tying up loose ends, knocking out paperwork, making phone calls I had put off, and wrapping up bookkeeping tasks.

If you’re one of those people who is that productive every week, then I want to be you when I grow up. But for the rest of us, I think most people have experienced this pre-vaca bump.

The vacation departure deadline is unmistakably fixed. You aren’t going to push it back. Then there’s the desire to put some things away so they won’t nag at you while you’re away. Finally there’s the push to clear things up so that the tasks awaiting your return aren’t bigger than they have to be. It is the perfect storm of productivity, and you are wise to use it to your advantage. You triage, and you focus, and you accomplish.

The question now is, how do we create such urgency on all the other weeks? I don’t have a quick answer. But I’m working on it. One thing I know is that our motivation – our acting and our failing to act – is entirely driven from within. The deadlines only have the value we grant them.

If you have some thoughts on motivation, please share them!