Summer, Deadlines and the 34 Degree Problem

It's Tuesday, the temperature in Lincoln is heading towards 34 degrees by Thursday, and I'm sitting at my desk in a house that was built for grey skies and soggy Augusts, not a heatwave.

I work from home most of the time, which in winter feels like a privilege but the last few months has felt like a test of character. There's no air conditioning, the windows face the wrong way. Trying to summon up the focused, productive energy that my clients pay me for becomes considerably harder to access when the air itself feels like it's pushing back.

This week I have deadlines, and they’re not going to move because the day is melting and my dad's birthday falls on Thursday, which is also, inconveniently, the day the forecast peaks. There is genuinely no version of Thursday afternoon where I'll want to be at my desk. I know this about myself, however, knowing it in advance is actually the useful bit.

This is what I've learned after years of running my own business: it’s not the summer burnout and heatwave that catches most people out, it's the guilt that comes with wanting to step away from work that isn't finished, the internal negotiation between what needs doing and what your body and your brain are telling you they need instead.

Most of us are very bad at that negotiation, myself included. We either ignore the deadline entirely and pay for it later, or we sit at the desk sweating and miserable, producing work that's half what it should be because we're too proud to admit that working in 32 degrees isn't our finest hour.

The answer, as far as I've found one, is front-loading, with enough awareness to know that Thursday is going to be what it's going to be, which means Tuesday and Wednesday need to carry a bit more weight than usual, not heroically or at the cost of sleep / sanity (let’s face it, the clammy night will do that anyway!).

It's not complicated, but it does require self-knowledge, something most people avoid because it means being honest about your own limits.

The reward system matters too and by that I don't mean the kind of performative self-care that social media would have you believe involves expensive candles and a gratitude journal. I mean the actual, practical understanding that if you work well and with focus on the days you have to, you've genuinely earned the right to close the laptop on Thursday and be somewhere else entirely. There's no guilt in that, the work’s done and you planned for it. Also, a Cadbury ice cream whilst you’re working helps too!

What nobody else can do though, is make that choice for you. The culture of ‘always-on’ productivity that most of us have internalised over years of working tells us that stepping back is a failure of commitment, but it isn't. It's a fairly basic piece of resource management applied to the most important resource you have. I know I’m a massive hypocrite for even writing this because I’m terrible at self care, but that said, even I know that sometimes the deadlines are what I’ve created them to be in my own head.

Thursday my dad will be 81, he has Alzheimer’s, I don’t know how many more he’ll have, or worse, remember, it's going to be 34 degrees and I want to be with my family. I'm planning to be nowhere near my desk post lunchtime and the reason I can say that with any confidence is because I'm not waiting until Thursday to decide. The work that matters will get done before the heat wins or it will wait.

Sometimes that's all self-care actually is: being organised enough in advance that the decision, when it comes, is already made.