The weather is lovely, the sun is shining, birds are singing outside and you… You’re sitting in your office thinking about all the vacation requests you’ll have to go through in the next few months. Summer is awesome, but when you run a business or manage teams it can be a little tricky.
The worst thing about summer is that the beautiful weather and vacation fever lowers your productivity and focus. As a result, your time and budget management may suffer.
Here are the best tips for all of you who already got back from holidays, or haven’t been on vacation yet and have to stay on track with time and budget.
Stay motivated
You might find it hard to motivate yourself to work during the summer – it’s vacation time, hot and sunny outside and the only thing anyone would want to do is sunbathing on the beach or gardening in the backyard. However, your projects and work needs to be taken care of even in the summer months. Motivation is the key to productive work. That’s why it’s extremely important to stay motivated to work, track time and budget.
Enjoy the summer!
It’ll be nearly impossible to feel motivated if you deprive yourself of pleasures of summertime. Instead of driving your way to work, take a walk or cycle, and on your way back home don’t hesitate to treat yourself to an ice cream cone.
Revisit your vision
Remind yourself and your team why you’re doing what you are and what is your goal. What do you want to accomplish? Summer is the perfect time for teambuilding meeting outside and an excellent occasion to retrospect about the vision of your business.
Change (or create) your routine
You probably have a daily routine and if you don’t, then you should create one. Most of our behavior is automatic, habitual. You want to create good habits to max out the productivity and personal development benefits they can bring. Wake up early and enjoy summer weather – exercise outside, walk a lot,
Assess your projects
Summer months are those in the middle of the year – and very often this is the time when many projects are well developed and in the middle of completion. It’s a perfect time to assess how your projects are doing.
What should you evaluate?
- Schedule – are you meeting the deadlines, or is there always not enough time? If you aren’t completing tasks in a timely manner, ask yourself what contributed to the delay? Was it some unpredictable factor, or something that you could account for, but for some reason didn’t? Your customers are expecting you to deliver the end result of your project on time and there is nothing worse than customer expectations that are not met. That’s why it’s so important to ask yourself and your team these questions during the project lifecycle, not only after completing the project.
- Budget – are you able to deliver milestones within your budget? Maybe some of them surprised you with how big the costs got and maybe some turned out to be cheaper in production. Remember that hours of work should also be budgeted – your teammates are probably getting paid for the time spent on working on the project, so it also should be included in your budget and tracked. If you’re looking for time tracking and project budgeting solutions that you can integrate with your current project management tools, check out TimeCamp. It’s a tool that allows you to keep track of every hour spent on work, integrates with more than a hundred most popular project management apps and much more 😉
- Satisfaction – are you, your team and your customers satisfied with how the project is doing so far? Maybe there is something to improve? Maybe you can implement some changes to make your team or customers or both more satisfied? Summer is a great time for small changes and creating new routines – you can use it to your project’s advantage.
Plan for the summer
Planning for the summer ahead of time will help you to make sure that you get your work done and also have some time for yourself. No matter how busy you are, you also need a break to take care of your physical and mental health as well as to improve your private life.
Looking at the summertime as a whole when planning is great, but being more specific will also pay off. Plan the next day before you go to bed – this way you’ll avoid the mess and you’ll make sure you have the time to enjoy summer!
Focus on the right activities
Don’t be busy – be productive. Find ways to minimize the time spent on activities that could be handled otherwise. Instead of doing it all yourself, you can:
Delegate tasks
It seems easy, but it isn’t and delegating tasks properly is a skill to be learned. Especially in the summer, you can feel overwhelmed by the amount of work. However, you probably aren’t working alone. Delegating tasks to others will not only make you feel less overloaded but also will make your co-workers feel appreciated and trusted.
Automate
You must have read and heard it a million times now, but it is crucial these days. The more you can have done by simply using a computer to do it for you, the better. Automation frees up time that is always scarce. Automatically completed tasks are also less prone to human mistakes – as long as they’re set up properly. What is more, your stress related to the management of recurring tasks is decreased.
The variety of tasks that you can automate ranges from time tracking and budget tracking to invoicing, data backups or even paying bills. Try it once and you’ll probably never go back to completing these tasks manually.
All in all
Summer can be demotivating sometimes, but hopefully, with our tips, your productivity will increase and you’ll always stay on top of your budget and time during summer holidays 😉 Do you have some advice on how to stay on time and budget in the summertime? If you do, the comments are yours!
Awesome post. This is a quite informative article. thanks for sharing the tips.