Memorial Day Weekend is fast approaching, anyone have any fun plans?? Right.. It’s been the longest spring of the decade, that’s for sure. People are dying to get out of town and take some time off. Anything to break up the monotony.

After a long couple of months indoors, the remote work day’s beginnings and ends blur together on a continuous calendar of sameness. Focus, understandably, is a challenge. Add summer to that equation and distractions will further compound across teams.

It may even seem like team productivity has been up lately. But is it sustainable? Or could it be that people are working harder because they’re worried about their jobs. Unlikely that they’ve been doubly inspired to redline their efforts day after day for months on end.

It can’t last. It’s almost summertime.

In the summer of 1991, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett got together for dinner and both agreed that the #1 factor in their successes was focus. Stevie J also used to say “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done”. You can find both of these parables in this Forbes article.

So here’s a simple idea before the upcoming MDW weekend that may help when distractions and desires to be elsewhere abound:

1. Call the team together
2. Tell them for the next few months you’ll collectively focus on just a few things. Maybe 3 things. Try to keep it under 5
3. Over communicate what those things are and organize all your activities around those few objectives all summer long

Keep it simple and bring the pace down after a long indoor spring to keep the team together and focused. The rest, let it go until the fall.