It’s summer time! 
We are less than six weeks in to the Game of Thrones waiting game and counting down the days until (or fondly remembering) our summer vacations.
To help get out of the summer office space slump, we pulled together a few easy tips on staying productive in your community corrections office.
We know it can be difficult to stay focused on your clients and their treatment (much less all of the paperwork that comes along with them) when you’d rather be at the pool.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t make the most of the time you have this summer with your clients.
- Get active! Take your sessions outside your office. Why keep everyone cooped up inside when you can take your sessions and programs outside? Take a walk around the office or use the stairs instead of the elevator. Here are some other ideas for moving around the office from the American Heart Association.
- Help your clients plan something they can look forward to. You planned an exciting vacay or to spend some of your vacation days with some much needed R&R and so should your clients! Sure, they can’t vacation in a traditional sense, but something to look forward to in the near and/or farther future can be encouraging. While community corrections practitioners spend a lot of time focusing on the process of EBP and the journey of treatment to assimilation, sometimes it can be just as productive to look at what your end goals and ideal environments are.
- Make a great playlist. Just like we talk about creating focus as part of the processes of EBP for your clients, we can do ourselves a favor by doing small things around the office to keep us focused. How great is the upbeat happy music that comes with summertime? Channel your summer happy place through a playlist that will keep your mood up and your day moving with some great beats.
- Add some easy things to your summer checklist. We all have heard that writing down your to do list makes you more likely to complete your action items. We propose adding some easy, smaller tasks to that list too. Maybe you have a summer wellness goal like drinking more water. Or maybe you want to send more positive reinforcement messages to your clients. (If you have CorrectTech sending messages to clients is easier than ever!) Add these smaller tasks to your daily checklist so when you complete them and scratch them off you’ll see your list dwindle down faster.
- Take a vacation. Take some time off. Get that R&R so you can come back rejuvenated and bring a piece of your vacation back with you. Studies have show a strong correlation to happiness and productivity. The University of Warwick found that happy employees were 12% more productive and worked harder. Taking time off and letting yourself do what makes you happy helps you bring a better version of yourself back to the office. Don’t you think your clients deserve to work with the best version of you?
Hopefully some, if not all, of these tips help you out this summer but we know sometimes a work slump isn’t seasonal. If your slump is more than just the summer time slump and more about the overwhelming paperwork, the use of multiple systems and all of the duplicating efforts, you should check out what we have to offer to make any time of year more productive.
