At the end of every summer, I hear some version of the same anxious refrain from academics, writers, and professionals in transition, beating themselves up: “I was supposed to get so much more done.” Here is a partial list of the items that get mentioned: The dissertation chapter was going to be finished. The article polished and submitted. The book proposal revised or the book finished. My professional website redesigned and relaunched. The research files organized for the first time or reorganized in terms of new priorities. Or the really big one, “I’ll have the next phase of my life figured out.”

The dream

Back in May, summer stretched out like a wide-open field. We would finally have time to catch up or finish projects with the space to focus and think deeply. Rest and recover from a previously hectic pace. Write brilliantly, maybe even harboring a secret desire we could win an award for it. We have such high hopes and expectations for being productive and returning to our regular schedule in the fall with something big accomplished.

The reality

Then reality sets in. The summer brings different family obligations, such as juggling summer activities for children and unexpected interruptions like friends or relatives turning up, looking to you to be a tour guide in your geographical area. There are medical appointments, other caregiving responsibilities, financial worries, emotional exhaustion, social or job upheaval, possibly involving moving to a new place, plus the ordinary wear and tear of being a human handling all these obligations. With luck and planning, you may even have some fun things to do, like vacationing or traveling to a new place, but it still takes time and energy to organize.

Stop beating yourself up

Are you being realistic about what can truly be accomplished in a limited amount of time with all the other demands you are handling? I don’t want you to get to August or September carrying a heavy sense of failure. I know this feeling of “I’m not living up to my own expectations” all too well. I always think I can get more accomplished than I do. Then I beat myself up for not getting “anything” done when in truth I’ve done a lot. Maybe just not exactly what I planned.

Unhelpful guilt

There is a peculiar guilt experienced by highly conscientious people when they believe they have “wasted time” or “squandered an opportunity” to get work done. Unfortunately, there is always more to read, revise, prepare, improve, submit, organize, or create. Self-directed academics and ambitious professionals are especially vulnerable to this guilt trip because clear stopping points are hard to find. 

We live in a culture that praises exhaustion and quietly treats rest as something to be earned. We suffer from believing our value is tied to output.  The expectation of being highly productive was a huge measure of worth in my family of origin. Meanwhile, the guilt expands with our inability to get anything finished or the sense that whatever we have done “isn’t good enough.” You might want to read an earlier post of mine, “How do you evaluate success?”

There are many more important things in life than finishing an academic or professional project. Yet people who are objectively accomplished will describe themselves as lazy because they didn’t produce enough during the summer. The summer carries so much symbolic weight with a fantasy-like quality, a magical season of uninterrupted productivity. And when that doesn’t happen, these thoughtful, intelligent people beat themselves up with nasty words, treating themselves with less compassion than they would extend to other people in their lives.

Life is in the small moments…

As a counterpoint to this negative internal dialogue, I recently found myself thinking about something Robin Sharma wrote over a decade ago in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. The book is a parable loosely based on the author’s alter ego, Julian Mantle, who suffers a heart attack and must revise his view of work and the world.

The character decides to stop chasing after grandiose goals, realizing “Most of us miss out on life’s big prizes. The Pulitzer. The Nobel. Oscars. Tonys. Emmys. But we are all eligible for life’s small pleasures. A pat on the back. A kiss behind the ear. A four-pound bass. A full moon. An empty parking space. A crackling fire. A great meal. A glorious sunset. Hot soup. Cold beer. Don’t fret about getting life’s grand awards. Enjoy its tiny delights. There are plenty for all of us.”

To stop beating yourself up, enjoy the detours: 

• Take that trip to the beach or go hiking in the mountains.
• Read a novel that’s not part of your work tasks.
• Have a nap because your body needs it; don’t let self-care be yet another obligation to fulfill.
• Savor a spontaneous call with an old friend, or a long walk with a new friend.
• Sit outside and watch the sunset.
• Delight in your family, celebrating funny things that happen along the way. The cake that falls flat because a leavening ingredient like baking soda was left out; the dog dressed up in silly clothes for a holiday; frantically looking for the glasses on your head; texting something deeply personal to a service provider bot. 

These particular detours will not occur again. You owe it to yourself to get off the treadmill of productivity from time to time. Remember, resting is good for your brain and will enhance your ability to use your strategic prefrontal cortex for thinking. Beating yourself up is unproductive.

…and in the bigger things, too

It’s not just the little things that add up for a summer well spent. It’s some of the big things, too. You may be:

• Dealing with grief yourself or helping a friend survive a period of grieving.
• Handling the issue of finding care for aging parents, perhaps helping them move out of a home of decades to enter assisted living.
• Parenting your own young children, juggling camps and other organized activities
• Helping someone else handle children as they go through a divorce or become empty-nesters.
• Navigating institutional financial chaos with department mergers or closings
• Supporting colleagues suddenly without work or demoted through no fault of their own
• Recovering from illness or helping a friend get to cancer treatment appointments.

Staying emotionally afloat and available is of huge value to others. Real summers with all the demands upon you are messy. You are not wasting your time prioritizing care over productivity. You are simply experiencing a well-lived life. As the old joke goes, you are unlikely to say on your deathbed, “I should have spent more time at the office.” It’s the people you have cared for and loved, and those who have loved you, that matter most.

Letting go of fear

Let go of the fear that if we slow down too much, maybe we will lose momentum entirely. This fear can become deeply internalized because so many professional systems reward overwork. We’re afraid of becoming irrelevant or disappointing people we admire, or never getting our important project finished. It can be nice to realize you will never catch up, no matter what you believe about getting your life under control. There will always be new projects, another publication to prepare, a conference to attend, or team obligations.

We are human “beings” not human “doings.” We are not designed to produce continuously. That’s the job of artificial intelligence and machines designed for endless output. We are living organisms with emotional limits, physical needs, changing identities, and complicated inner and outer lives. Your summer of “doing little to nothing” could be you in recovery. Procrastination could be processing grief around whatever is changing in your life.

What if you are becoming someone new, with new priorities and needs? Or simply allowing your mind to do the slow, invisible work of finding a different way to meaning and happiness? In David Whyte’s book, Consolations II, he defines the invisible as “the very beginning of a thought first heard in the secret quiet of the human mind that then finds a voice.” Perhaps you are living into that idea. No need to beat yourself up.

Meaningful work and meaningful relationships

I care deeply about meaningful work. I am not arguing against ambition or even to-do lists and planning. Finding structure is a necessary part of creativity, as anyone who has ever written anything can tell you.  Writing matters to me. Scholarship matters. Purpose matters. Vision matters. And people matter. The idea that every moment not spent producing is somehow wasted or inefficient feels unhealthy to me, but I promise you it has been difficult for me to accept this. Being human is not an obstacle to be overcome.

We must learn to see the importance of building relationships as fruitful, and not as interruptions to our planned schedule. Instead of rushing through an experience to get on with the next piece of the project, savor the time away from it. Notice beauty and experience awe in the miracle that is life on our planet. Such awareness and appreciation are not quantifiable. These things may never appear on a performance or academic review, but they shape your life just as profoundly as professional accomplishments do. The work requiring specific outputs won’t go away, but you may have a better perspective on it when you return.

Spaciousness

I also think many people underestimate how much creative and intellectual work depends on spaciousness. Clarity can emerge during a walk or staring out a window instead of at a screen. Stepping away from constant pressure to produce may allow us to remember why we cared about specific work in the first place.

The past several years have asked enormous amounts from people emotionally, financially, intellectually, and psychologically. Institutions are strained while expectations for workers remain high. New forms of technology have erased many natural boundaries between work and life. There is a lot of talk about efficiency, trimming waste, and working smart instead of hard. Beating yourself up for failing to live up to these impossible ideals underlies these notions.

Even leisure is often accompanied by a subtle pressure to document, optimize, monetize, or justify it. Witness the huge numbers of would-be influencers on TikTok. For work, what this generally amounts to is a diktat to do more with less, piling more and more responsibilities onto available personnel. And rarely paying employees more while inflation creeps up, for the increased pressure and responsibility of additional work.

People are carrying more than others can see, and there are limits to what anyone can do. Emotional and physical capacities can change as we age. Expectations may require either small or large revisions in the face of societal or personal turbulence. Goals may need to be abandoned or shifted in response to reality; after all, that’s exactly how science experiments often work. We need to treat ourselves and others with compassion and stop measuring the value of a life, or a summer season, solely by visible output. What is the point of completing our work if we miss our actual lives while pursuing impossibly high objectives?

Reality check

Just as a reminder, a typical non-fiction book generally takes 6 to 18 months to write and refine from start to finish. The drafting phase usually takes 4 to 12 months, with outlining, researching, and editing. Add a couple more months dedicated to formatting. I usually tell my clients they should expect to spend two years writing a book, especially as it is usually squished in between all their other responsibilities.

Fiction can take even longer to write, with exceptional, well-written novels many years in the making. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien took 12 years to write, unsurprisingly, when you think about the entire world and all the languages he created. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt took 12 years to write and won a Pulitzer. Salman Rushdie spent 5 years researching and drafting the story of Midnight’s Children to capture the complex history of post-partition India. In Rushdie’s own description of his process, he says the whole effort took closer to 13 years, while he worked as an advertising copywriter producing “unbearable amounts of garbage” and learning the craft of writing.

Conclusion

If your summer did not unfold the way you planned, that’s OK. You do not need to earn your humanity through productivity. This particular summer—the conversations, sunsets, walks, laughter, ordinary afternoons, and fleeting moments that filled it—will not come again. Being able to support the people important to you in their time of crisis is of enormous value. The unfinished writing will still be there. The article can still be revised, the proposal can still be submitted, and the book project or the science experiments can continue. A meaningful life can contain both accomplishment and presence if you give yourself permission to experience both in their own time and space.

Living this way means your summer was most assuredly not wasted, and you are not a failure. Stop holding yourself to impossible standards. Quit carrying around the guilt and shame of “not accomplishing enough.” Shut down the inner critic. Your worth is not measured by output alone. You’ll be happier and more productive in the long run if you learn how to pursue meaningful goals without abandoning yourself and enjoy those profound, unexpected, fleetingly magical moments, small and large, of your life.

If you need help to stop beating yourself up and change your life, contact Hillary for a twenty-minute free session.

Tags: academia, academic writing, attitude, beating yourself up, becoming yourself, change, dream, happiness, summer, writing