Staying Motivated During Summer Months

“Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.”

― Gregory Corso

“Then he continued: 'From the first day I met you, I knew better than to hope you might amount to anything. I saw no sign of promise, nothing in you that might suggest you might accomplish something worthwhile or even turn yourself into a respectable human being: nothing to shine or to shed light on anything ... There is nothing inside that head of yours but garbage and rocks.”

― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The summer months for anyone in the working world are a time of fantasies and daydreams of escapism: whether you are constantly looking out your window or wishing that you had a window to glance at, opening up dream vacations or social media statuses of everyone else seemingly enjoying themselves, or just wishing you could be in your bed sleeping in instead of in the office when everything seems to slow down and you are throwing away a perfectly beautiful day meant to be enjoyed under the summer sun. 

Well, let’s be real here: whether you’re a Fortune 500 CEO or an intern, a day laborer in the fields or a freelance writer, your mind will try to take you out of your work into a daydream that will get you through the day–but your mind will also make you worry about work even when you are in that hypothetical vacation. 

Let’s pull back a moment to look at two timeless tales: The Grasshopper and the Ants from Aesop’s Fables, and Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 

You know the former story: during the summer months, the lazy grasshopper wants to lie around or play while the hardworking ants toil all year around to prepare for the winter. By the time winter has come, the grasshopper has no food or a place to live, while the ants are relaxing and enjoying the fruits of their labor in their home, but because of their kindness and hospitality, they welcome the grasshopper into their home and share their food, before advising him to work hard during the summer. 

The latter story has Tom Sawyer being tasked with painting some fences white, and wishing to avoid work, he convinces the other boys in the neighborhood how lucky he is to have so much fun painting the wall by himself, and gets them to demand to let them paint the wall for him, leaving him to lie around sleeping while they do his job for him.

If you’ve spotted the thread, congratulations: you have the mind of a brilliant slacker! Brilliant? How so? Check this out: a quote often falsely attributed to Bill Gates actually said by automobile executive Clarence Beicher in 1947 states that “putting a lazy man on it [a job] makes a difficult task easier because he will always find a way to do less work to get the job done”. 

In other words: if you’re lazy, but you have even a semblance of responsibility, you will observe Parkinson’s Law: “The time it takes to get the job done is the time given” which means that whether you are given a week or a month to do a five-page report to the board of trustees, this is the exact time you will use to get things done. Whether you are a person who wants things done the moment you are assigned a task or inspired by last-minute panic, the former will agonize and review even nights before the presentation, and the latter will find a way to do “good enough” because in order to sell to the board, the person running the presentation needs to buy into his own greatness himself. Think of Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill character from the Better Call Saul television series telling people that he once convinced everyone that he was Kevin Costner because even he started to believe it himself before telling everyone he was Kevin Costner. 

Since we live in the real world and the professional world, not everyone has a stroke of genius or insight to get through the grind. Here are some reminders about the summer months that can be ways to inspire you to get through each day and eventually the season when you’re worried about being motivated:

It’s probably winter somewhere else during your summer 

Angels for Angels is based out of Bellevue, Washington, which is in the Northern Hemisphere, and so for that reason, when we think of summer, we think June through August usually (and if we go by the solstice, until September 21 even, or sometimes include May). On the literal flip side, the Southern Hemisphere is winter during these months, and during our winter, it’s their summer. 

So while you are worrying about time slowing down or not much going on during the summer months, we live in a global village, and time isn’t slowing down for us because of the seasons or our geography–it’s moving along because everyone is on their own schedule. You should then create your own schedule and flow because the world isn’t going to stop for you or motivate you.

The fiscal year isn’t the same as the calendar year

Did you know that the fiscal year doesn’t start in January and end in December? Often, businesses follow the IRS and the tax return schedule, but otherwise, they can file with the IRS when their official fiscal year starts and ends, though they tend to stick to the IRS’s schedule in April because it just makes it easier to sort things out by the time taxes are due. 

In addition to this, the debt cycle in basic macroeconomics doesn’t follow a set schedule–it follows trends. Likewise, global events in politics, technology, and pop culture have their own lifespan, and nothing fits into a neat, ordered seasonal cycle. You can use this knowledge to remind yourself that something is always going on so that you’re not in the “bored summer slacker” mindset and instead the eagle-eyed scout looking for opportunities, news, action, and danger. 

Daydreaming about taking summer off is a privilege

If you wish you could be at the beach or sitting at home under the air conditioner, guess what? Some people can only dream of that because they don’t have the privilege to do anything but work. 

In the Central Java region of Indonesia, there are laborers who break their backs carrying sulfur up and down the mountain, dealing with blazing heat year-round or monsoon rains. They earn enough for food and may not even have a basic elementary education, let alone can they afford to put their own families to school or dream of moving up in life. They can dream about having a lazy day under the air conditioner or enjoying one of the many beaches in their country, but realistically, they can’t do that because someone has to get the sulfur and they can’t afford to skip a day, as the consequences of this means that they and their families will end up skipping a meal because of their laziness.

If you can’t motivate yourself, look beyond yourself and see that as inspiration to work hard in gratitude for your privilege, and to enjoy life that others can’t even dream of, but don’t punish yourself out of guilt either.

See these little reminders as a means to give you some motivation to keep pushing yourself during the summer, but also to remind yourself that life isn’t just work, work, work. If nobody is dying or starving, you can find a way to remain satisfied with whatever you deliver for work without just making yourself another body in the office on the clock.