Episode Summary

What if you could be more productive while working fewer hours, this summer?

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses strategies for preparing your business to operate on a reduced schedule during the summer months! She emphasizes the importance of setting intentions and boundaries, batching work, clarifying meeting strategies, and leveraging team support to maintain productivity while enjoying a lighter work schedule. The episode provides actionable tips for business owners looking to balance work and personal life during the summer months.

Key Highlights:

• 36% of U.S. workers are less productive during the summer months.
• To make your summer workload lighter, setting clear intentions for your schedule is crucial.
• Batching work can help lighten your load.
• It’s important to prioritize critical meetings and communications. Utilize tools like Loom and Voxer for efficient communication.
• Having a team or assistant can ease your workload.
• Be proactive in blocking time for personal commitments.
• Enjoying a lighter schedule can lead to greater overall satisfaction!

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about how to prepare your business to work a reduced schedule during the summer. Now, as I'm recording this episode, I'm preparing to go on spring break, and that has me thinking ahead to summer. So I wanted to share some ways that

I prepare my business to work a reduced schedule during different times of the year, particularly during the summer, some tactics that our team leverages to help our clients lessen their work week as well. But before I dive in, as I was preparing for this episode, I was thinking, am I the only one who wants to work a reduced schedule during the summer? Is this just a Wisconsin thing where we have just so few weeks during the year that we have

warm, sunny weather that we want to go out and enjoy. I know we have kids home from school, many of us during this time, maybe that's part of it, but is this just, is it a mom thing? Is it a Wisconsin thing? I'm not sure. I dug in a little bit and according to a day four survey, 36 % of US workers are less productive during the summer.

So apparently I'm not alone. I know there are offices that are closed on Fridays during the summer. They have a lighter schedule. Maybe they shift into four 10 hour days instead. There are a lot of different ways that companies are maybe allowing for a little bit more flexibility with the summer with that in mind. But I was also thinking about this, that the survey identified that more than a third of US workers are less productive during the summer. But

What if we turn this on its head and you could be both productive and work less this summer and maybe even beyond? Maybe this is an overall evolving concept that you're constantly trying to implement in your day to day so that you can work fewer hours for a variety of reasons. Whether you are a parent and you know that kids are gonna be home or maybe you are training for a marathon and you want to be able to invest more time either in the mornings or after work in order to...

you move forward towards that goal. I think if there are ways that we can identify to work smarter and not harder and overall reduce the amount of time that we're creating, the better. There's just so much more possibility that comes along with that. So without further ado, wanted to set aside four things that I am doing and we help our clients do as well whenever they're looking at reducing their overall working hours. But I'm looking at this through the lens of preparing for summer.

And the first thing is to set your intentions and boundaries regarding your time. So maybe think a little ahead a little bit more. Are you intending to work shorter days where maybe you have kids at home and you want to log off by 2 p.m. every day so that you have a longer afternoon or maybe you've got a lot of summer activities, summer sports that are happening in the afternoon and evening hours and you want to be logging off early during the day.

Or maybe you want to work and consolidate your time into Monday through Thursday and you want to be off on Fridays. Or maybe you want to split up the week and have, you know, maybe be working half days. Maybe we're going to be off on Wednesday afternoons and, you know, Thursday mornings, whatever that looks like for you. Get clear on what you want your work schedule to be over the summer. And certainly make sure that you plan ahead for

any vacation weeks or extended time that you want to take off. And go ahead and block that time. Let's just go ahead and solidify this right away so that you're not faced with a dilemma of, somebody scheduled a meeting with me and I really wanted to be out of the office by then. Somebody scheduled a meeting at 4 p.m. but my son has soccer and I need to get him to the field by five o'clock and that's going to be cutting it short. Let's go ahead and be proactive and block it in our calendar right now.

Okay, step number two, batch your work as much as possible or work ahead. So I think of this, especially when it comes to our marketing activities. So what we wanna do whenever we're working a redo schedule, especially during the summer, we don't wanna scale back on some of our sales and marketing efforts because that creates a feast and famine cycle in your business. Maybe things are going great heading into the summer.

but we don't want our pipeline to be empty by the time fall rolls around and we're ready to go back into the office on a more full-time basis again. We want to be continuously feeding our marketing channels so that we do have work to come back to. We do have a steady stream of clients and customers coming in. So I highly recommend making a list of things that can be done ahead of time and start working on those and...

working ahead on those and prioritizing those over the coming weeks leading up to summer. So I'll give you some personal examples of this. For me, that looks like recording this podcast. So my daughter is 10, and so she's at an age where she doesn't require constant supervision from me, but she certainly needs to be entertained, right? So what we're looking at doing is a schedule where she's got maybe summer camps and day camps and things.

about every other week. So they have summer school in the month of June, that goes eight to noon in the mornings, and then in July and August, we're doing like an every other week. So what I am looking to do with the podcast, just to make sure because I know there are going to be some weeks that she is home, and it'll be difficult to record these, are to record some episodes in advance so that that way I have a bank of episodes ready to go so that if it's not a conducive time for me to record when I have

and maybe even some friends running around the house, just not the right time to do this. But I also want to make sure that I have content for all of you to consume over the summer. So this could also look like batching some of your social media content or writing blogs ahead of time. There are so many marketing activities that we can do in advance and have those queued up and ready to go. So we're not necessarily spending our time on them in real time when we're trying to reduce our schedule.

Make it so start considering what are some things that you can batch and do in advance in order to lighten the load over the summer. Okay, step number three is to clarify your meeting and communication strategy. So again, what I'm looking at doing and what I help a lot of clients look at as well is determine which meetings are absolutely critical that you want to prioritize and make sure that you have open space for. So

For me, this is a no-brainer that I wanna make sure that I have time open and available for potential clients to meet with me. so prioritizing sales calls, that's likely going to be one of your highest priorities as well. Or if you are an executive director of a nonprofit, maybe that's meetings with donors or strategic collaborations. We wanna make sure.

which meetings are the most important and how much time realistically do we need to reserve for those because that's very, very important. And then from there, figure out what are some meetings that maybe we want to hold off on. Maybe for example, you normally reserve time for one-on-ones for networking purposes. You do a lot of online networking. Maybe what you wanna do over the summer is be very strategic and maybe only have one a week.

or maybe just one a month. I don't know what that looks like for you. I don't have the right answer specifically for you, but maybe it looks like really prioritizing those and only meeting with referral partners, not necessarily meeting with people who want to pick your brain or maybe they discuss a lot of ideas, but nothing really comes to fruition. You know what I'm talking about. I'm not trying to be harsh here, but when we're looking at reducing our schedule, we have to become

more choosy with how we spend our time and meetings are a huge part of that. So then we also want to look at how are you going to communicate between meetings or in replace of them? So if you have a full team and you know that you're not going to be in the office, does it make sense to instead of having a weekly team meeting, maybe does it make sense to reduce it to every other week?

Or maybe there are ways that your team decides, you know, we're all going to be in and out of the office over the summer, our schedules are gonna be a little bit more relaxed. Are there other ways that we can communicate instead of having meetings? So I can give you an example of some of the other communication tools that our team uses. We use Loom quite a bit, which basically is a video software that we can just record screen share.

So I can walk through things with the team. So for example, if I decided that, you know what, during the month of the summer, I'm not gonna be doing our team calls. What I can do is I can just hop on a Loom video and briefly record, here's an update on where things are at with incoming clients. Here are hours and projects that are going on in the upcoming month. And I can just do a quick voiceover of that video, send it to the team so they have the information they need. Another.

item that we use or another tool that we use is Boxer, where we can send voice memos back and forth to each other. And that drastically cuts down on meeting times. It also cuts down on emails because if somebody has a quick question for me, they can just hop on and ask and I can respond. And it's just very conversational and it's very, very easy. So think about, there other ways that others can connect with you that don't necessarily require you to meet with them in real time?

And we're looking to conserve your real-time availability as much as possible and be highly strategic with that. So I know other clients will use Slack as another communication tool. I'm just thinking of a few others here before we move on from this one. But I think it's really, really important to identify which meetings you're going to be taking, how much time you want to allow for those meetings and reserve for those meetings.

Okay, the last thing here that I have for you is to have your team or your virtual assistant provide extra coverage for you. Because what we don't want is we don't want to have it where you're taking off every Friday and you're spending a lot of time on Thursday afternoon or working late on Thursday afternoon trying to clear your desk for the week so you can be off on Friday. And then also on the flip side, spending half of Monday digging out from Friday with all the emails and things that have come in.

while you were out. And so this is where having a team or a virtual assistant can be really, really helpful in reducing that overall workload for you. It's also great to have a backup contact person for clients who reach out or others who reach out to you. So I know that I have an out of office responders set whenever I'm out of the office. And certainly that includes when I'm out during different days during the summertime.

is to have people reach out to my assistant if there's something urgent that needs to be handled and then she is able to reach out to me via text message or a phone call if there's something truly urgent that she can't help them out with. So what that does is it just gives me a little bit of breathing space and confidence that if there is something, if there is a fire that emerges or something needs to be put out,

my assistant is there to first of all, see what she can do on her own to alleviate the situation, or she can reach out to me and I can provide some guidance and direction on what needs to be done. So that is huge. That just gives me that space and that buffer and that confidence to know that I'm not completely abandoning my business, my team, my customers, and there's somebody there to support them. But it also is great because there are many things that my team can handle.

in my absence on their own that don't necessarily require my help. The other great thing is that my assistant is monitoring my email. So the things that can be filed, the things that can be deleted, the things that are frequently asked question or maybe some new inquiry comes in from a potential client, she's able to jump on that, respond to them, get them booked on my calendar for a time that I can connect with them. And it just makes going into my inbox on a Monday morning,

after having a long weekend, so much easier and so much less time consuming. So in order to prepare for something like this, if you don't already have other team members who can back you up, or if you have a VA, now would be a great time to consider having that conversation. Would love to have you reach out to me directly if you're in need of a VA or a fractional team to support you, or maybe you have some plans for hiring a personal assistant over the summer, maybe.

There is somebody that you know in your neighborhood who is currently looking for work. Maybe they would like to help you out. There's so many options to get good quality help in your business, but highly recommend you start seeking that out, trying to figure out who might be able to help you out if you don't have someone already in preparation for the summer. And then certainly next steps with that, once you find the right person to help you, getting email and calendars sharing set up. That's another first step to kind of dealing with the day to day.

and getting that extra support in your inbox, sharing, also making sure that you have out of office automated responders so that you are again protecting that time and setting that boundary. Like I am out of the office until like Monday, Monday the 27th. I'm making this up off the top of my head. No idea if the 27th is on a Monday, but you get the idea. If you have an urgent need, please talk to so-and-so or if an urgent needs arise, here's my cell phone.

And then that way the expectation isn't that you have not responded to this person's email. Then they have a reasonable timeline to know that you will not be reaching out to them. You will not be responding to them until you are back in the office. I think that's really important. And it's obvious and it's low tech. It's been around forever. But you'd be surprised at how many people don't set that up. And then they feel like they need to be checking their email on their phone when they're trying to enjoy some family time.

at the beach or take a road trip or take the kids to the park and then they feel like they have to be working and on top of things. So just want to throw out some of those easy solutions for this as well. Thank you so much for tuning in today's episode. I hope that this information was help you not only to prepare for the upcoming summer, giving yourself permission to take a lighter schedule.

but also for other times of the year or in different seasons of life that you need to pull back on the business a little bit and really be intentional with the way that you're spending your time because you don't have a lot of it in this particular moment or season. So I appreciate your support. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, wherever you are listening to this, subscribe, leave a review.

That would be great to help us out and communicate to the people that be the webs that be that, you know, we're legit podcasts and we're putting out great content and others should check it out as well. So really appreciate your support on that. And I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye.