Being Productive This Summer

What are your plans for the summer? We have a formula for a great summer for any rising high school senior:

Two parts of creative productivity balanced by one part of lazy fun.

WEEK 19 TIPS & TRICKS

You probably already have some idea of how you want to occupy the one part of lazy fun, so this post is dedicated to creative productivity. When it comes to figuring out how to fill your hours in a way that is both creative and productive, we’re big fans of chores and self-assigned projects.

Chores? That’s right, chores! You know, the basic tasks of living that someone else has probably been doing for some of you, like changing the sheets on your bed, cleaning the bathroom, doing your laundry, preparing meals, washing dishes, vacuuming.

In a little over a year, you will leave for college and become responsible for doing at least some of this stuff for yourself (top of the list – laundry). You want to be ready, and there is no better way to develop these skills than to have some practice while you are still at home.

If you aren’t already pitching in, tell your parents you’ll be doing your own laundry this summer and that you’d be happy to do the laundry for the household too. Then ask if there are one or two other chores you could do that would help.

Once you’ve decided which chores you are going to do and blocked out time for those, you get to assign yourself some projects. Projects are anything that (1) transforms your creativity, initiative, and effort into a tangible thing that can be used by you or shared with others and (2) is an accomplishment that can be documented. They can be organized activities (whether through school or an outside organization) or they can be DIY projects.

For DIY projects, the possibilities are endless — building a birdhouse, sewing a T-shirt, organizing photographs into a scrapbook, reading the classics, learning a language, cooking the perfect brownie, inventing a new one-person game with a broom and a tennis ball. You get the idea.

Your goal should be to assign yourself three to six projects that you can complete this summer. Need some help generating ideas for projects? Go to this wonderful website, which documents 52 creative projects that author Jeffrey Yamaguchi designed and did himself. To quote the author:

”The idea of 52 Projects isn’t necessarily for you to do exactly these projects. Following something to the letter is never that much fun. The main intention is for you to do projects. Hopefully these projects will give you a starting off point, or maybe the spark that ignites the idea, perhaps a reminder of the thing that you’ve been wanting to do.”

You can also check out these in-person and virtual volunteer opportunities for teens or consider becoming a citizen scientist and helping with important research.

You can have a productive and interesting summer — all it takes is a bit of planning, and you might even look back on as the best summer of high school.