With summer upon us, many of us are looking forward to taking some well needed time off to enjoy the warmer weather and longer nights. But, of course, during summer, your business still needs to operate as effectively as it does throughout the year.
It's crucial to take time off during the summer - especially to enjoy the school holidays if you have a family - but doing so might leave you worried that things will not always be achieved as efficiently as possible. To find a balance between a well-deserved break and peace of mind that things back at the office are still running smoothly, you need to effectively manage your time.
One of the best ways to make your time management more efficient is to streamline your diary during the summer holidays. This ensures that the important tasks still get completed and that you get to enjoy the summertime with your loved one, benefitting both you and your business.
Below we’ve listed out our ultimate guide to streamlining your diary through the summer holidays.
Firstly, you need to take time to plan how and where you can streamline your responsibilities to help you manage your diary as efficiently as possible. Investing in a half day planning session is actually a positive investment in your time, even if you might feel that initially you are unable to allocate half a day to planning. Highlight all of your upcoming engagements and separate them into work and non-work events using two different colours.
Then, write a separate list of the goals and objectives that you wish to achieve by the end of your financial year. Working with the two lists next to each other will help you to focus on the truly important tasks, meetings and events you need to attend, eliminating those which are a drain on your time without directly impacting your objectives.
Include family and friend events, too, and try to set a personal goal that you wish to achieve over the summer. Working on both personal and career-based goals simultaneously will give you a greater overall sense of fulfilment. Often people find that achieving personal goals alongside career goals gives them a heightened sense of creativity and focus, impacting both sets of actions positively.
Once you have completed this exercise, encourage your team to do the same, they’ll feel inspired that you’re valuing their personal, as well as their professional, development, and by leading by example that time away from work is important they will feel reassured to enjoy their breaks as they come. The greater the sense of satisfaction your team feel when they’re in work, the greater the level of investment they’ll put into their work.
The school holidays give you an opportunity to spend time together as a whole family, enjoying each other’s company and making memories to last a lifetime. Make sure that during the school holidays, whatever diary commitments you make, you are putting your family first where possible - it’s a time of year many people chose to prioritise family events including sports days, holidays and weddings.
With your team, you need to consider how you can streamline your diaries together. There will be work commitments you need to attend, but by streamlining your work together can open up opportunities for different people to attend different events at different times amongst the team. Encouraging your team to spend time with the people most important to them by streamlining diary commitments, and sharing the load with their team, will help them return to work with more energy than before, ready to tackle the challenges ahead.
Before the summer starts and you’re left shocked by your major clients being off on holiday, ask the question early on to find out when people are away from the office and book your meetings accordingly. If you have projects due during the summer holiday period, make sure all of your key meetings are booked around your team's and your clients' holidays so that all deadlines can still be met effectively. Even if you have to have a full day of meetings, it’s best to adapt to the breaks people are taking, whilst ensuring you have time in the office to complete the work.
Encourage your team to work together to achieve project deadlines, splitting workloads to accommodate their different holidays and internal and external commitments. The summer holidays are a great time to improve team work and encourage increased collaboration as your team work together to ensure they can all make the occasions important to them. Communicate all key dates throughout the team of people responsible for the project, and ask them to also streamline their diaries to prioritise the most important tasks, or projects, being mindful of absences within both their own team and their client’s teams.
Reflect on your longer-term goals and objectives and use the summer holidays as a time to achieve these goals. The holidays give you a short but realistic timeframe to push tasks forward, usually lasting around 6-10 weeks. Ask your team to target themselves on achieving 1-3 key short term goals which will take them closer to their overall objectives.
Breaking your long-term objectives down into shorter term tasks will greatly improve your ability to achieve the business’s ultimate goals. This focused period could actually help you to move important goals forward in a more effective way than you thought possible previously. If you have time booked off towards the end of the summer holidays it can be particularly rewarding to go off for annual leave, knowing you have achieved everything you wanted to in the lead up to your holiday.
See the opportunity to streamline your diary through the summer holidays as a chance to cut the clutter of events and commitments that don’t really need your time. Your team will benefit from the process of removing unnecessary commitments they have signed up to, making them more efficient in the office.
Another option is to streamline your diary is to engage with remote PA services. Contact us today to discover more.