We have finally reached the time most of us parents have been longing for during those long summer weeks – back to school! Don’t misunderstand us – we love our kids and we absolutely love spending time with them! However, the long school holiday does mean our work productivity can take a bit of a nosedive and we end up losing some focus.

But let’s be honest, before we know it we will be swept away with the Christmas madness and beginning to lose focus again, so what tactics can we employ to keep ourselves focused at work during the Autumn term?

First things first – get organised. Write a to-do list of everything you want to accomplish. Once you’ve got that, write another more realistic to-do list for today. You shouldn’t have more than 10 achievable tasks on your to-do list – any more and you’ll start to actually find it demotivating!

Set aside some time to get through your emails, post and paperwork and get it out the way. There’s nothing more distracting than a full inbox. Allow yourself time each day to get your admin out the way so you can focus on your tasks in a dedicated block of time.

Set yourself small and realistic targets which see you through until Christmas. If you can’t plan that far ahead, set aside time every Monday morning to set some targets for the week. Keep them short and achievable, such as finishing a report by 3pm on Friday. If you set them regularly, you’ll have enough short but realistic targets to keep you going all term and before you know it it’ll be feet-up-drinking-wine-o-clock again!

Don’t forget to give yourself rewards when you meet your targets (you deserve them!) and why not get your colleagues involved to keep it fun and competitive.

Summer might have made it difficult to get anything done at home or at work. Perhaps you’ve been itching to book next years family holiday, upload your summer photos or research the best parenting tips to stop your kids swearing so much. Whilst its tempting to choose these personal tasks over work – try to save these for the evening when the kids are in bed and don’t lose track of the dedicated work hours you have to get things focused. Why not put these on your lunch break list instead?

Whatever you do to get your mojo back – just remember that you aren’t alone. It wasn’t just you dropkicking the littlun over the playground fence at 8am on the first school day back (metaphorically of course) so don’t be hard on yourself and work as a team with your colleagues to get focused. Meet as a team and kickstart the new term as a team with lots of energy and team spirit!

If there are members of the team who’ve been working hard over summer whilst others took holiday, remember to recognise their hard work holding the fort, they’ll appreciate it.

At Brightstone we truly believe in enjoying both work and life and our goal is to help our clients achieve the same. We were lucky enough to be able to enjoy some time with our kids over the summer and we had the same problem trying to shift gear a little and get into focus once they go back. We are all just humans after all.

If you need us to help you motivate your teams with some team building days, provide some skills training or provide some business coaching – just get in touch and see how we can help!