Ways to Overcome Summer Stagnation

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Are you suffering from summer stagnation?

For many of us, summer is seen as a time for leisure. Our colleagues are off on family vacations or extended weekends hitting the beach, travelling to other countries, or finding a cottage in the woods. This can lead to a slowdown at work as key individuals are out of the office and offline. Projects pause and many of the usual meetings are cancelled.

Under these conditions, workers may feel less engaged and unmotivated as they wait for the office to return to normal. A recent article on Korn Ferry.com points out that 46% of office workers believe the quality of their work slumps in the summer. This can have many effects.

Indeed, being unmotivated during the summer can affect your ability to meet goals later in the year, says Mark Royal, a senior client partner for Korn Ferry Advisory. “It can negatively impact your image and personal brand within the organization,” he says.

Don’t let summer stagnation overcome you.
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However, this time need not be wasted. Employees can take advantage of the summertime shift at work to explore news ways of doing and thinking. To counter stagnation, the article explores five ways to stay energized at work during the summer. One of the suggestions in the Korn Ferry article is to switch things up by busting out of the usual routine.

Simple changes—like working outdoors instead of indoors, or at a coffee shop instead of at home—support engagement and renew excitement, says Val Olson, a career and leadership coach at Korn Ferry Advance. “Slumps can happen due to a lack of variety. Variety is the spice of life,” she says.

If you can’t get out of the office, try rearranging the furniture or adding new decor to revive a tiresome space. Varying your surroundings can be energizing and aid focus.

Another way to take advantage of quieter summer workspaces is to reflect on what actually excites you about your work and career.

More people on vacation often means fewer meetings and emails. Experts say you can use this lull to reflect on, and pursue, the aspects of the job that most engage you. Being able to find meaning and value will help motivate you during any downtime, as well as when the workload heats back up.

Read the full article to learn three more ways to turn summer stagnation into engaging and worthwhile experiences.

What is Your Clutter Personality?

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Take a moment to look around your room.

Are there items in your surroundings that are out of place? Are there scattered belongings that need to be tidied up? If so, how long have all these possessions been sitting there waiting to be cleared up?

No matter how diligent we are clutter seems to inevitably fill our lives. How we react to it and eventually address can be challenging. Nonetheless, are there ways to more successfully clear clutter by understanding how we interact with it?

Kat Brancato at the website Real Simple believes that each of us has a clutter personality. Understanding how each type acclimates to that clutter is a key to clearing it out. In her recent article, Kat explains six different clutter personalities, and how each one needs its own approach their mess to resolve.

Organizing methods are like diets—what works for one person may not work for you. Diane N. Quintana, certified professional organizer and founder of DNQ Solutions, LLC, says that organizing anything is a very personal journey.

“Each one of us is unique, so while there are organizing tendencies, you may find that parts of one or more of the organizing personalities resonate with you,” she informs.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Kat then explores the clutter personalities, starting with the “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” type.

Do you tend to keep your counters riddled with items so you know where they are? Quintana says that the “out of sight, out of mind” personality likes to see what they have. “If something is stored away, it may as well not exist,” she says. “These individuals leave things out to remember them, which often leads to cluttered countertops, desks, or floors. It also results in things being misplaced or lost amongst the clutter.”

Since this personality type needs visual reminders, Quintana suggests using clear containers, labeled baskets, or open shelving to keep important items visible and tidy. “A photo inventory of contents attached to the outside of the clear containers can also be helpful,” she adds.

To read about the remaining five types, please read the rest of her article.

The One List People Trust

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Do you trust your lists?

The simplest organizational tool is the humble list. Anytime a person gets an item out of their head and onto the written page or electronic notebook automatically relieves the tension around remembering it. In fact, David Allen has often summarized GTD as getting stuff out of your head.

However, it seems that many people are allergic to doing this simple task. Whether it is due to an assumption that they will never forget, or fear of knowing the full extent of everything on their mind, lists can fall to the wayside. But is there one list that we always trust?

In a recent blog post, David Allen shared what he believes is the one list almost everyone creates and trusts. It is their calendar.

If you ever feel like you need to defend your lists, ask your skeptical friend if they are sitting around trying to remember what appointments they have on their calendar for next month. They’re probably not biting their nails about where they need to be a week from next Thursday at 4pm. They’re probably not even thinking about it. Why? Because they have their appointments tracked in a system they trust—a calendar they trust they’ll review at the appropriate time and place.

So why do people trust their calendar and not the other lists they make? David has pointed thoughts on that as well.

The problem with most people’s system is that the calendar is the only list they trust, and more than 95% of what they really need to keep track of is not a set of appointments but all the things to be done in between them. Thinking that your head is a better place to keep track of stuff, and yet finding it critical to maintain a calendar, seems to me a kind of intellectual dishonesty.

Read David’s full post on the Getting Things Done website.

Can ChatGPT Write a Speech Better Than a Toastmaster?

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Just say you need to give an important speech, but only have a few minutes notice. Can an AI chat service bail you out?

For my upcoming Toastmasters meeting, I was challenged to write a speech titled, “AI – Friend, Foe, or Tool?” As a fun experiment, I decided to see what ChatGPT would do with this topic. Would it be honest about its limits, share it deep dark secrets, or in the end just give me an okay speech.

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On the Efficient Librarian website, I wrote an article showing the prompts and output from this process. For reference I used a free ChatGPT account, which still provided enough access for delivery of a speech, but a few limitations on its output options. The whole process took less than five minutes from start to finish.

Overall, this quick dip into the AI waters showed that for all its versatility there are still some weaknesses. For example, I asked for a 5 to 7 minutes speech, but what was provided took only four minutes to speak. Also, it ran into some issues with suggestions that in the end I couldn’t do with the free service.

To see the entire process and read my other thoughts on this AI exercise, please read the article on the Efficient Librarian website.

The Death of Goals

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Have you recently created a set of clear, written goals?

Most career advice emphasizes the idea of writing down measurable goals that one then pursues with laser focus. This is said to be the key to success in work and life. However, is this advice sound?

In a post on his website, Tiago Forte pondered the idea that we have reached the Death of Goals. He starts by lamenting the continued assumption that SMART goals are the be all and end all of achievement.

Every time I bring up “SMART goals,” I can see the light go out in my students’ eyes. An unmistakable feeling of dread and aversion fills the room, and the decline in energy and enthusiasm is palpable. They know they should set goals that way, but they don’t want to.

The SMART framework was developed 44 years ago by a director of corporate planning at an electric and natural gas utility – not exactly a paragon of modern business in the information age.

I knew traditional goals were an outdated relic of a bygone era, but I hadn’t figured out what to replace them with. After all, they seem like such a load-bearing pillar of modern society: you set an objective, you make a plan, and then you follow the steps to get there. 

To Tiago, a possible solution lies in the book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Kenneth O. O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. For the authors, goals are fine when the project is about incremental improvement or completing rote tasks. However, the value of goals collapses when the scope of possibilities grows larger.

The problem arises when we try to scale up this modest strategy to greater achievements – those that involve true ambition, novel invention, innovative breakthroughs, or pushing the frontier.

These are the kinds of pursuits in which goals lose their power, and can actually become counterproductive and lead you in the opposite direction of progress.

To understand why, it’s helpful to think of achievement not as creating something completely new from scratch, but as searching a space of possibilities.

Tiago believes that goals work best when the environment is well defined. The problem comes when we encounter undefined and unknown conditions. As technology and society advances in unexpected directions, a reliance on goals can be a dead end.

For the most interesting, exciting, impactful achievements, goals are a false compass, distracting you from the highest potential directions. They induce a narrow tunnel vision, eliminating the serendipitous discovery, unorthodox creativity, and breakthrough innovation that are most valuable.

In other words, the best path through the vast hall of possibilities is not a straight one; it’s a twisty turny wild ride of daring leaps and hairpin pivots that would seem positively crazy to any outside observer.

The article ends with Tiago’s six steps to think outside of goals. These steps allow people to appreciate the value of interesting problems and expand their realm of thinking to a broader range of possibilities for success.

Read the full article to learn more about the limitation of goals and a possible alternative for progress.

So, what is your non-goal?

Upcoming Events

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Do you plan to be at the ALA conference in Philadelphia next week?

If so, there are opportunities to hear me speak at two different events.

June 27, 12:45 pm
Library Insights Summit 2025 – Philadelphia
Library Challenges and How Publishers Can Help – Panel Discussion
In Person Event

June 29, 1:00 pm
Interview Prep Made Easy
ALA JobLIST Placement & Career Development Center
American Library Association Annual Conference
In Person Workshop

Not going to the conference? Then plan to join me in August for two online trainings sponsored by ALA.

August 6, 2:30 pm.
A Plan for Personal Productivity for Library Staff: From Inbox to Completion
ALA Webinars

August 7, 2:30 pm
Managing Employee Performance Using the SBI Method
ALA Webinars

Hope to see you at one of these events.

Take Part in the Summer Reading Challenge

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It’s summertime! What are you going to read?

Libraries across the country are encouraging their members to grab an armful of books and make it a summer full of reading. For example, the Palm Beach County Library System has started the annual Summer Reading Challenge. As shared on their website:

Residents are invited to join the 2025 Summer Reading Challenge: Color Our World. Summer is a season that beckons everyone to embark on new adventures, explore faraway lands and lose themselves in the magic of stories. Where better to start your journey than at the Library!

Don’t live in Palm Beach County? Never fear! Almost all public libraries across the country engage in a summer reading program. Visit yours today to get started.

Summer reading challenges are happening at a time when many authors and researchers are highlighting the need for deep reading. An article from last October from the National Endowment of the Arts points to data showing a slump in reading for pleasure. An interview on NPR similarly discussed how Americans are reading fewer books. The effects of these trends are far reaching and still being studied. I intend to explore this topic more in future posts.

Meanwhile. I invite you to personally try to reverse this trend by signing up for your nearest summer reading program. Then pick your favorite books and enjoy the read!

Do Less

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When was the last time you did less?

Most of us live very full lives. Between work, exercise, housekeeping, and other commitments it seems like being on the go is the natural state of affairs. However, is it healthy to remain constantly picking up new projects, agreeing to new responsibilities and rushing to the next meeting?

In a Time magazine article from last year titled Do Less. It’s Good for You, journalist Jamie Ducharme explores how doing fewer things may bring greater health and life enjoyment. To do so, we must first rethink what it means to do less. Ducharme points to a set of studies that show how hard it is for most people to relax.

Researchers including Michelle Newman, a professor of psychology at the Pennsylvania State University, have also studied the concepts of “relaxation anxiety” and “relaxation sensitivity,” which relate to the discomfort, boredom, or unease some people feel when they slow down. For some, “There’s this view that, ‘I should always be busy doing something,’” Newman says. “Often people feel like it’s not okay to just be reading a good book or watching a good program on TV.”

She then points out how relaxation through doing less is vital to staying healthy.

The truth is, rest and relaxation are vital to well-being. Chronic stress negatively affects nearly every aspect of mental and physical health, even contributing to higher risks for chronic disease and premature death. Meanwhile, rest may boost your health, quality of life, and longevity. Getting better at resting and relaxing, then, isn’t frivolous; it could actually be lifesaving.

The challenge of doing less involves setting boundaries between work and home, relaxing the body, and starting small with changes. To learn more about how to reprogram yourself from a state of constant doing to a lifestyle that values relaxation, please read the rest of the article.

Who Should Attend?

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Have you ever attended a meeting and wondered why you are there?

Sometimes people send out meeting invites across the entire organization on the assumption that many heads are best. However, more attendees often make a meeting less productive. An article from Flowtrace indicated that 35% of survey respondents believed that limited the number of people in the room was important for meeting success.

When participants start to believe the meeting is a waste of time, their engagement slips. This can lead to mildly disruptive behavior, such as looking at phones or side-conversations. At worst, it can rise to active disruption in the form of pointless argumentation or snide comments.

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A cardinal rule of meetings is to invite as few people as possible, but enough to make the meeting effective. How should a meeting planner determine whom to invite? Here are a few parameters:

  • Does the meeting topic directly affect a potential attendee’s core job functions?
  • Are they directly responsible, or part of the team responsible, for the item discussed?
  • Will they carry out actions resulting from decisions made at the meeting?
  • Do they have specific expertise relating to the topic of the meeting?
  • Could a team leader attend in place of the whole team and report back?

For example, an early high level meeting to discuss the allocation of the materials selection budget could be attended by the division leaders, including collections, finance, and administration. A future meeting where the discussion reaches branch level allocations could be expanded to include the branch division head and specific managers who oversee special collections.

In addition, keep in mind that not all participants need to stay for the entire meeting. When someone is done with their portion of the meeting, allow them to exit if feasible. To that end, it is helpful to organize the meeting agenda to enable participants with limited roles to have their items discussed early so they can leave to resume their regular duties.

Remember, employees work time is valuable. Don’t waste their contributions by obligating them to attend unnecessary meetings. They will appreciate it.