14. Surviving the Summertime Slump

At Work with The Ready

It’s an unspoken truth in most knowledge work that summer is a wasted season. From late May to early September, many teams face reduced numbers and it’s nearly impossible to spin up anything new. The director you need approval from? On a cruise. The graphic designer you need for that new marketing campaign? Camping with the kids. When people just aren’t around, it can sometimes be easier to keep the lights on during the vacation relay race and run out the clock until fall.

The two most common sense solutions: take vacation yourself or focus on different things when people are away. But actually doing either of those things? Way harder than you’d expect, especially when modern work is tuned to overwhelm mode 24/7/365.

In this episode of At Work With The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin talk about why summer is where organizational progress goes to die, and how we can stop spending those months doing business as usual and instead live a hot employee summer.

Interested in hearing more about the sunshine, twilight, and midnight zones? We’ve got stuff coming soon! Sign up here to get first access.

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Mentioned references:

• "Vacation OS episode": BNW Ep. 142
• "async episode": AWWTR Ep. 7
• "medieval peasant vacation time": all articles point back to Juliet B. Schor's 1993 "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure"
• "workshop episode": will be released Monday, July 22nd!
• "work as a paycheck discussion": AWWTR Ep. 11