Episode 94: SUMMER REWIND - How to enjoy a guilt-free summer

00:45 Welcome to Unfrazzle, I'm your host Louise Miller and one of the ways in which i'm creating space to enjoy my summer is by having a break from recording new podcast episodes for a while. Instead I'm doing an Unfrazzle Summer Rewind sharing some of my favourite episodes from the last year so if you're hearing them for the first time I hope you find them helpful and if you've heard them before perhaps should take something different from them the second time around! So have an amazing summer and I'll be back in your ears with new episodes soon For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the summer holidays are fast approaching or maybe they're already here depending on where in the world you're listening. If you usually take a break or spend less time on your business to spend more time with your kids, you're probably familiar with the feeling of guilt that tends to get amplified at this time of year so you feel guilty that you're not with your family when you're squeezing in a quick hour of work and

01:39 And you feel guilty that you're not working when hanging out with the kids. So, you can't win right? Whatever your doing, your fretting about the thing you should be doing instead. And so often your not fully present and get to end of summer feeling like you should have done more whether thats resting, fun, time with kids or around house So what can you do about it? Well, first of all I would love for you to suspend your disbelief and entertain the crazy notion that it is possible to enjoy your summer without guilt. But that doesn't happen by accident! You need to get ahead of it so you need to take some time out to make thoughtful intentional decisions about what your summer is going to look like

02:22 So if you're taking some time off, you need to think about what needs to get done before your break and what can wait because the truth of the matter is that when you're planning to take time off you can't do all the things you would usually do because you know... You don't have the same amount of time. Now I know that for some people the time pressure that happens when they're getting ready to go on holiday means that they magically are able to do everything that they would usually do which kind of proves Parkinson's law that work will expand to fit the time you have available for it But for many of us, if you've got six weeks of school holidays to contend with and very little time to work on your business chances are you actually won't be able to do all the things. So instead of pretending that's not true what if you accepted that it is?

03:06 What if you're okay with not getting as much done? What if you decided what enough looks like for you so that you can focus your energy on that and then enjoy the summer without feeling guilty. And I promise you that it's possible, I have seen it happen! After seven years of running her business one of my clients had her first experience of actually enjoying the school holidays without feeling guilty knowing she'd done enough – she knew she had done what was important And the amount of work that she got done may have been no different than the amount of work she did in previous years during the school holidays. But back then, she felt like a failure because she kept telling herself that she should be able to do more this time around she'd made it a choice and actually in this case my client did get more than usual done not because she was working more hours but because she was crystal clear about what she needed to do during the hours that she was working

03:58 So none of that happened by chance, right? It happened because she had me reminding her that the holidays were approaching and encouraging her to make those decisions about how she wanted to navigate that time. So think about what enough looks like for you over the summer. So Tom and I are about to go on holiday for a week, and so yesterday i sat down and wrote a must-do and a nice-to-do list of things that need to happen before our holiday. And then when we get back from that holiday my sister who teaches in Dubai she's going to be in the UK for her annual summer visit. So at some point over the next few days

04:35 I will be taking some time to decide what enough looks like from a work point of view for the month that my sister is here because i don't want to spend my summer glued to my desk and feeling like i can't hang out with her, because all this other stuff i should be doing. I want to still get the important impactful stuff done and then give myself permission to step away and have some fun And I know that the only way I can do that is to decide ahead of time what's important and what can wait So if you want to enjoy a fun and restful summer where you're working less and spending more time with your family Have a little think about what you've got coming up, how much time you actually want to spend working and what enough looks like for you. Write that down and then look at it every time you sit at your desk over the summer And then get curious! Treat this summer as a bit of an experiment See what making those choices ahead of time does for your productivity and for your guilt levels As always I really hope that this helps with that I hope you have a really wonderful summer and i look forward to seeing you again soon

05:38 Thank you for listening to Unfrazzle. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who needs a dose of calm productivity in their life and I'd love it if you could leave me a rating and a review as that will help more people discover this podcast. If you'd like to hear more from me to help you stop faffing and take back control of your time, you'll find a link to join my mailing list in the show notes and I would really love for you to join us so thanks so much for your support and I look forward to seeing you next time!