Summer Not Delivering? Here Are Some Fixes

There are two truths when we think about summer: it should be fun and we should accomplish great things. Here’s hoping you are having fun, and accomplishing some of the great things on your list(s). But when summer is past its midpoint and it’s not delivering, here are some fixes that can help get it back on track.

What we talk about when we talk about fun

First off, the word “summer” just means fun. This goes back to childhood when we’d run from school on the last day, a long, luxurious summer ready to unfold before us. And most of the time it happened. Anything felt fun after having been confined to school classrooms.

But as time went on, fun got a bit more complicated. There were the list of things we wanted to do, the people we wanted to hang out with, the rites of passage that just meant summer. Then college or young adult summers, and finally adult summers. Lots of change there. Instead of architecting our days, our days took on a pattern, no matter the season. Work or responsibilities meant we needed to carve out time for “fun.”

When we said “yes” to all the fun things

You know what I’m talking about. All the commitments we said “yes” to months ago. The weekend visits to far-flung friends’. All the holiday parties, pool parties, boat cruises. Yes, they’re all fun. But when mixed all-together in one short summer, they can signal overload.

No doubt, some people thrive on every minute being filled. But if that’s not you and you find every weekend booked-up this summer, you need to give yourself permission to opt-out of a few things. The ones that never really had a strong pull, the ones where you’re with the same group of friends multiple times, the extended-family events that multiply every year.

Giving ourselves permission to opt-out can be challenging. On the one hand, we want to do it all. But on the other, doing-it-all means our summer is nothing like we’d imagined. You might want to take a look at our Free Download, Your Summer Permission Slip, even hang it on your fridge. It’s a reminder that summer’s short and it’s the only one we’ll get this year.

We’re meant to accomplish great things in summer

Not the vacation plans or the social calendar, the other list. The one that formed sometime around late May, half in your head and half on paper, full of things you were finally going to get to once the pace slowed down. The creative project. The physical practice you’d let slide. The corner of the house you’ve been meaning to reclaim. The habit you’d restart. The thing you’d learn.

You were going to have time for all of it. Summer was going to make room.

And now it’s mid-July. The list is still there, mostly untouched. And somewhere underneath the surface of an otherwise fine summer, there’s a low-grade sense that you’re behind. Behind on things you were supposed to be doing in your free time, which is its own particular absurdity if you stop to really think about it.

The problem with the summer list

The summer list is a special kind of trap because it masquerades as optimism. You made it from a good place. You anticipated space, feeling hopeful about what you’d do with it. But what actually got written down was the backlog: everything that had been waiting, plus everything you’d been wanting, plus a few things you felt you should probably do.

That’s not a summer list. That’s a life list with a seasonal deadline. No wonder it’s not getting done. No wonder you feel behind. You set yourself up to accomplish in three months what you’ve been accumulating for years, during a season that also contains heat and disrupted routines and other people’s schedules and the simple human need to occasionally do nothing at all.

The feeling of being behind isn’t a sign that you’re living through a disappointing summer. It’s a sign that the list was never realistic to begin with.

What ‘behind’ actually means

Behind implies a schedule. It implies that at some point, someone decided you were supposed to have accomplished X by now, and you haven’t.

But who made that schedule? You did. In late May, in a moment of seasonal optimism, before you knew what this particular summer would actually look like. That version of you had access to the list but not to the reality. Not to the week that got consumed by something unexpected, or the stretch of heat that made everything harder, or the fact that rest sometimes just looks like rest and doesn’t produce anything.

Being behind means falling short of a standard you set before you had the information you needed to set it accurately. That’s not a failure. That’s just how planning works.

The microshift here isn’t about catching up. It’s about questioning the schedule itself.

The audit that takes ten minutes

Here’s what I’d suggest, and it’s not a productivity exercise. It’s a reality check.

Pull out the summer list, or reconstruct it from memory if it only ever lived in your head. Look at each item and ask one question: does this still matter to me, right now, in the summer I’m actually having? Does clean out the garage, the basement, and reorganize the kitchen cabinets really all need to be done now? During this short three-month window?

Not the summer you imagined in May. This one. The one with its particular shape and constraints and what’s actually been true about your energy and your time.

Some items will still matter. Those stay. Things like putting in the raised garden bed you’ve always wanted. Maybe sitting outside at the new outdoor cafe in your neighborhood. Or visiting your friend with the summer place on a lake. Some were always more aspirational than real. Things you felt you should want to do rather than things you actually wanted. Those can go.

And some are things that genuinely belong in fall, not summer. They found their way to the list because you were thinking about the whole year. Not because summer was the right season for them.

What you’re left with after this audit is your real summer list. It’s shorter than the original. It’s probably three to five things at most. And here’s the thing about a list that short: it’s actually possible.

The microshift: one thing, this week

Once you have your real list, the next move is simpler than you’d think.

Pick one item. Just one. And find the smallest true unit of it. The version of it that fits in the summer you’re actually living, not the summer you planned.

If the item is “get back to painting,” the smallest true unit isn’t setting up a studio practice. It’s getting out the supplies and spending thirty minutes with them this weekend. If it’s “start walking again,” it’s not a training plan. It’s a twenty-minute walk tomorrow morning before it gets hot. If it’s “finish the thing I started in the spring,” it’s not a deadline. It’s opening the file and working on it for an hour on Saturday.

The pattern I keep coming back to, across every version of the unbegun thing: we wait to begin until we can do the whole thing. But we can almost never do the whole thing. Not in summer, not in any season. We can do a piece of it. And a piece of it, begun, is infinitely further along than the whole thing, imagined but untouched.

Summer isn’t over

There are still weeks of summer left. Maybe not enough to do everything on the original list. There was never going to be enough for that. But enough to do one thing that matters, done properly, at the right size.

Enough to finish what you started, or begin what you’ve been meaning to, or simply reclaim one practice that got away from you somewhere between spring and now.

The summer list isn’t a measure of how well you used the season. It’s just a list. Some of it will happen. Some of it will move to fall, where it might actually belong. And some of it you’ll simply let go of. And the season will be better for it.

You’re not behind. You’re in the middle of a summer that turned out to be what it actually is, rather than what you imagined in May. That’s not a failure. That’s just July.