Step One: Don’t Let Yourself Get Bored
With unlimited time and very few priorities, it’s easy to get into a slump—sleeping until 1 in the afternoon, watching TV all day, getting on Facebook all night. So keep active, and occasionally force yourself out of bed in the morning to call your friends. Don’t get me wrong, take advantage of opportunities to sleep in and relax, but not so much so that you live in sweatpants and rarely leave your house. To avoid waking up with a day completely void of plans, try making plans in advance. It’s easy in the summer to forget how to do anything in an organized fashion, so most likely this will be tough. But for your own sake, take a little initiative, and don’t wait until you’re at home for the third day in a row to attempt to do something.
Step Two: Do Something Relatively Productive
This goes hand in hand with step one. Exercise. Work. Do something creative. Do anything to keep yourself feeling vaguely accomplished at the end of the summer. Set a goal for yourself, and try to accomplish it. This will keep you from feeling like you’ve wasted three months of your life doing absolutely nothing.
Step Three: Get a Job
Instead of making summer a time where your job is spending money, why not make some? Let’s face it, you have unlimited time, but there’s not much to do in Bel Air without spending at least a little money. Get a job. This will allow you to indulge in all that summer has to offer. Plus, you’ll feel productive.
Step Four: Relax and Smell the Roses
Take the time to put away all distractions, and just soak up what it means to be on summer vacation—no pressures, no school work, no classes. One day, in the real working world, we won’t have summers off. Let’s appreciate them while we can.
Step Five: Don’t Procrastinate (too much) on Summer Reading
If you’re a senior, then appreciate the first summer in a long time that you won’t have any summer work to do. If not, then try not to leave it until the last minute. Summer reading can loom over your head, and you’ll be surprised how relieved you’ll feel when you’ve made a little progress. Still, don’t finish all the reading in June—you won’t remember anything about the books in September.
Step Six: Go to the Beach at Least Once
The beach is the cliché summer vacation spot, and you’ll probably regret it if you don’t spend at least a little time there. Somehow, a summer is incomplete without beach time, and in order to have a well-rounded experience, you just have to go and enjoy the shore.
Charlotte Hagerman can be reached for comment at [email protected].