Half In, Half Out
Working From Home Through the Summer Fun
You’ve been planning for summer since camps opened for registration in February. You saw summer coming and you made a plan. Maybe not a perfect plan, but still a plan. Kids in camp for the last part of June and part of July. School starts in late August. That doesn’t leave too many weeks to juggle. It seemed manageable. You’d figure it out. Some days your kid would be at camp, some days they’d be home, and on those days you’d just be flexible. You’ve been flexible before. You’re good at flexible.
That was when school was still in session, but school’s not open anymore. Reality is starting to set in.
The Deal You Make Every Morning
Here’s what flexible actually looks like by mid-June: You wake up and the time you used to protect for your morning walk, the coffee before anyone needed anything, the fifteen minutes of journaling that kept you even-keeled, all are now items you trade away before 7am.
Your thinking is sound: if you get a head start on work now, you’ll be able to close the laptop earlier. More time with your family. Less guilt. Better summer.
So you skip the walk. You skip the journal. You open the laptop before your brain has fully arrived. And then the day runs you over anyway.
The calls go long. The to-do list replenishes itself like it’s on a subscription. By the time you could theoretically close the laptop, you’re too tired to enjoy what’s on the other side of it. The thing you traded your morning for didn’t actually buy you what you thought it would.
What You Actually Gave Up
Your morning routine isn’t a luxury. It’s a load-bearing wall.
The walk wasn’t just exercise. It was the thing that kept you from snapping at your co-worker. The journal wasn’t navel-gazing. It was how you processed the day before so it stopped bleeding into today. The quiet before the house woke up was where you remembered what kind of person you were trying to be.
When you traded those things for a head start on work, you lost the infrastructure that was keeping you functional.
And here’s the part that’s hard to say out loud: the work didn’t get better. You’re getting distracted on calls by the noise outside your office. Things are slipping through the cracks in ways they didn’t used to. You’re more behind than you were in April, and you gave up the things that were helping you cope in order to get ahead.
The Half-Presence Tax
When you can’t be fully present where you are, it’s exhausting.
You’re on a call, but part of your brain is tracking what your kid is doing in the next room. You close the laptop to go outside, but you’re still mentally composing that email you didn’t finish. You’re at the pool but you’re not at the pool. You’re at your desk but you’re not really there either.
Working from home in the summer. Is it the best of both worlds? Or the worst? Or a little bit of both? The proximity to the life you want to be living makes the gap feel worse. You can see the backyard from your desk. You can hear the sounds of a summer afternoon. And you are on a call.
Fatigue is the cost of being mentally present in two places while being fully present in neither. Your brain doesn’t get to rest. It just keeps switching. You yearn to “be where your feet are.”1
What’s Actually Happening
Before anything changes, you have to be honest about what’s actually happening. Not what you planned, not what you intended, but what is actually true right now.
You didn’t fail. You learned what flexibility costs when you have no margin. The routines you traded away weren’t optional. They were the reason you were able to move forward through uncertainty.
The tension you’re carrying (trying to be in two places at once) is information. The tension is telling you that the bargain you’re making has a price.You’re more tired, less present, and somewhere under the fatigue there’s a low-grade resentment that everyone else seems to be outside having fun.
It’s a pattern that you can’t change until you notice it.
Reflect and Act
Reflect: Think back to the last two weeks. What did you give up in order to make room? Did it actually buy you what you thought it would? Where are you most aware of being half-present?
Act: For the next week, don’t change anything. Just notice. Keep a running note (on your phone, on paper, wherever) of the moments when you feel the split. Work when you can’t fully be present with your family. Family when you can’t stop thinking about work. Just collect the data. We’ll do something with it next week in Part 2.
Adapted from the song Centering Prayer by The Porter’s Gate.