The first week of summer break has a particular sound to it. It's the sound of the office door opening for the fourth time in an hour; a snack request arriving precisely thirty seconds before your client meeting begins; an "I'm booored" delivered with the theatrical despair only a tween can muster. If you run your advisory practice from a home office, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
I've been there. I work from home and I raised two kids while doing so. And while my 'little ones' aren't little anymore, I haven't forgotten the summers when the school structure that quietly held everything together vanished, and I was suddenly expected to be a patient mom and a focused professional at the same time.
When those school bus doors close with finality in June and you're left with that mixed feeling of excitement and dread - take heart in knowing that you absolutely can do this! You just cannot do both perfectly, all day, every day, for ten weeks. But what you can do is build a little structure around the chaos - enough to protect your client work, your sanity, and the part of summer that actually matters.
Here's how I learned to manage it.
"Summer doesn't break your routine because you're disorganized. It breaks your routine because the system that was running quietly in the background (read: school) just went offline."
1. Give the Summer Its Own Rhythm
The single biggest mistake I made early on was trying to run summer exactly like the school year and wondering why everyone was miserable by July. Summer needs its own operating system.
Sit down before break starts and sketch a loose weekly rhythm. Not an hour-by-hour military schedule, but a predictable shape to the day. Maybe mornings are "quiet hours" when you take meetings and do deep work, afternoons are a little more relaxed - kids can play while you do interruptible taskwork, and Fridays are off-limits for client calls. Kids of every age do better when they know what to expect, and so do you. The goal isn't rigidity. It's a default pattern that makes the right thing the easy thing, so you're not renegotiating the entire day every single morning.
2. Protect Your Deep Work Like It's a Client Meeting
The work that actually moves your firm forward (the planning, the analysis, the thinking) needs uninterrupted time. That time is scarce in the summer, so treat it as precious.
Find your quiet windows and defend them. For me it was early mornings before the house woke up and the stretch right after lunch. Block those windows on your calendar, batch your most demanding work into them, and let the lighter administrative tasks fill the noisier hours when you're getting interrupted anyway. You'll get more done in two protected hours than in a whole fractured day.
"Don't try to do your best work in your worst conditions. Match the task to the moment."
3. Let Your Systems Cover for You
This is where I'll show my bias as an operations person, but I mean it: summer is when good back-office systems really earn their keep. The advisors who struggle most in the summer are usually the ones holding too much in their heads, because there's no bandwidth for that when you're also refereeing sibling squabbles, packing for the beach trip, and making sure little Johnny gets his summer reading done.
If your meeting prep launches automatically, if your follow-ups send themselves, if your client birthday reminders and scheduling nudges run without you, then a chaotic Tuesday doesn't become a missed deadline. Automation doesn't replace you. It covers for you on the days you can't be everywhere at once. If you've been meaning to get those systems in place, the season that exposes every operational gap is a pretty good argument for finally doing it.
4. Be Honest With Your Clients (They Get It)
You don't need to pretend you're available at full capacity when you're not. Most of your clients are juggling the same summer situation, or remember those chaotic days when they were: soccer camp, vacations, kids underfoot. It is part of the circle of life... the "messy middle".
A short note that says you'll be keeping somewhat lighter hours over the summer, with your scheduling link attached, is met with understanding far more often than frustration. Set the expectation, give them an easy way to book the time you do have, and then stop apologizing for being a human being with a family.
5. Plan the Fun on Purpose
Here's the part that I regretted (and still regret) the most: the "kid fun time" is the thing that gets squeezed out. Not because you don't want it, but because it's the only item on the list with no deadline attached. Clients need to meet. Emails require responses. Even dirty laundry and missed grocery runs have their own consequences. A rowdy afternoon at the pool or jumping around at the bounce house will lose to your inbox every single time unless you put it on the calendar like it matters.
So put fun time on the calendar. Block the Friday afternoons. Plan the zoo outing. Declare a random Wednesday an ice-cream-before-lunch day. The structure that protects your work is the same structure that protects the memories, but only if you give the memories a slot of their own.
Quick tip: Before break begins, block your non-negotiables on the calendar first — the pool afternoon, the beach trip, the standing no-work Friday. Schedule the work around the memories, not the other way around. What gets a calendar slot is what actually happens.
The Bottom Line
You will not get the balance exactly right this summer. Some days the work will win, some days the chaos will, and some days you'll answer an email with a popsicle melting down your wrist. Which is, incidentally, how "messy middle" got its name.
And I know it's cliche, but you really only do get so many of these. These summers when they're home, and bored, and underfoot. Before you know it they will have jobs of their own (cue "Cats in the Cradle") and you'll wish they would come visit and interrupt your day. Mine are grown now, and I promise you the work that felt so urgent has blurred together, while the memories of time having fun with them have not.
Build the systems. Protect the deep work. Set the boundaries. Do all of it, not so you can squeeze more work into the day, but so you can close the laptop without guilt and go find your kids while they still want to be found.