How to change your summer schedule

For many of us, summer forms the backdrop of some of our best memories. We want those same experiences for our children. But summer can also feel a little bit challenging for parents of young school-age children especially. The work-life balance that you create in the school year is disrupted. Childcare bills can rack up quickly. Transportation to camps during work hours can feel like an insurmountable challenge.

I found the challenges of summertime increased exponentially with each young school-age child. Camp is expensive for one child. It’s cost-prohibitive for four. In doing the math, I often found that it was economically beneficial to reduce my work hours in the summer. Even when it didn’t produce a big benefit, I still enjoyed the change of pace for both my young children and myself when I temporarily adjusted my workload.In some jobs, a reduced workload in the summer is a given. In others, it was almost more stressful to take time off than it was to manage four kids full-time alternate summer schedules.

I’ve now been on both sides of the table. I’ve been a boss who fields everyone’s unique summer schedules and I’ve been a mom who feels needy asking for time off. If you’re thinking about asking your boss for an adjusted summer schedule, here are a few things to consider when you pitch the idea to your boss.

Just Ask

Recently one of our kids started a new job. In their first week, they were scheduled to work on the night of a family member’s wedding. We told them to ask to swap shifts. They were mortified. I sympathized. I remember how important every decision and request felt when I first started working. We often feel like we are imposing on our workplaces something that seems very irrational. In reality, most bosses understand you have family commitments outside of work and will from time to time request off. Many have even institutionalized this practice with paid time off. So don’t be fearful of asking for it. The worst they can say is no. Just ask. They will have to know it’s something you’re interested in.

Think Like a Boss

But when you ask, think like a boss. As a boss, I find people often approach me with ideas about how to do things based solely on the benefit to them personally. I’m genuinely willing to help people achieve work-life balance, but I also have shifts to cover. Often in their fear of asking, people will build a case around why certain proposals are good for their family life or mental health to couch the initiative in positivity. I’ll applaud those benefits, but might struggle to make it work. Bosses think very functionally. If you can think functionally too, you can better address the challenges associated with increased flexibility.

Think through the challenges, be honest about them, and propose solutions. Since you are the person most familiar with your day-to-day responsibilities, you probably have the best idea of how to address issues. If taking off work one day a week in the summer is going to create an uncovered shift, consider alternate ways to cover it.

Be Creative with Scheduling

Think flexibly about your scheduling proposal–but keep it routine. It can be tough for a boss to consider a completely different schedule every week of the summer. Here are a few flexible alternative schedules you can consider:

• Work from home 1-5 days a week in the summer: rather than asking off, you could work in a different location reducing the cost of supervision and travel temporarily while the kids are out of school.
• Temporarily work on a deliverable basis: some jobs just need certain projects finished by certain deadlines. Ask your boss if every week you can submit the deliverables required for your job, but get them done on a flexible schedule. Maybe it’s easier to work early in the morning while the kids are sleeping in, take the day to spend with them, and then finish things up in the evening. This has been the case with many of my jobs. I don’t mind working nights and weekends and even very early mornings if it means I can do what I want with my family during the day.
• Take a Summer Sabbatical: Some workplaces slow down during the summer. Sometimes it makes economic and social sense to take off to spend time with your kids in the summer rather than pay child care. You might be surprised how willing your boss is to let you take off for the summer on unpaid leave and return when the kids go back to school.
• Come in Early: At one job I had I negotiated coming in at 6 AM for a season. I’m an early riser, but my kids like to sleep in during the summer. I was able to come into the office and get a lot done while they (and my colleagues) were sleeping. I was also able to get home by the early afternoon so we could go play. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it long-term, but I loved the productivity I had in a quiet office in the morning. I also loved feeling like I was getting almost half a day off every day when I left in the early afternoon.

Use Your Paid Time Off

Summer break ranges from 10-13 weeks across the US. You can use your PTO hours in flexible ways to get a little more bang for your buck. Take half a day off on Fridays so you have a longer weekend. Work through lunch and take use an hour of PTO at the end of every day so you can leave earlier. It was always a collaborative effort between my husband, my friends and family, and local programs to get supervision covered. But I wasn’t always looking for supervision. It was well worth my time off to take weekly staycations–even if they were just for a few hours.

Be Collaborative

In another article, I talked about how I used to team up with a close friend who has kids the same age as mine to navigate their summers out of school. If you have a work colleague with kids, consider how you could work together to achieve company goals and personal goals. You don’t have to watch each other’s kids to collaborate. Perhaps you could collaborate and cover for each other to ensure you both achieve work-life balance and the work deliverables get done.

This too Shall Pass

If you’re navigating summer schedules with kids, I sympathize with you. It’s a joyful season of life, but it can also feel very pressurized as you balance the demands of work and childcare. Those specific pressures do pass. Others replace them, but those specific pressures pass.

Today, I’m grateful for the flexibility I had with my kids in the summer. Whether it was just picking blueberries at you-pick-farms in the evenings after work or it was taking Fridays off to go swimming with our friends, those summer memories are precious. Every summer is different, but I hope yours is filled with good memories with your family.