Warning — Recalibration Needed: Back to School Is the Right Time for a Mid-Year Reset

Prefer to listen instead?

I actually talked through this one out loud before I ever wrote it down.

(Fair warning, the recording quality is rough right now, but the message is the same)

Right around July 15th every year, it hits me: when does school start again?

It's not that I don't love having my boys home. They're self-sufficient. They can feed themselves, and a couple of them can drive themselves where they need to go.

But by mid-July, between vacations, sporadic schedules, and the sheer pull of sunshine over screens, I start craving the familiarity of a schedule again. Knowing when I'm working on the business, and when I'm working in it.

If you don't have kids, you've probably felt a version of this too. June feels wide open. By late July, the schedule's thrown off balance, and there's this creeping sense of I still need to be productive, except the rhythm that used to make that possible is gone.

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Your Inventory Is Time

For solo service providers like coaches, chiropractors, therapists, and massage therapists, our inventory isn't product. It's time.

When the schedule fragments, we lose visibility into what we can actually accomplish. And often, we lose track of something bigger: the goals we set back in January, back when we were feeling ambitious and the year stretched out in front of us.

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Reverse Calendaring

Here's something I'm trying. Not proven yet, just an experiment worth sharing.

If something lands on my calendar as an appointment, I show up. No problem. What I struggle with is getting tasks done in the space between appointments, especially in summer, when the rhythm's off and everyone else's schedule is unpredictable too.

So this week, I tried something different. I took a blank calendar and mapped out the hours I actually had available for tasks: not appointments, just open time.

Wednesday and Thursday were solid back-to-back appointments. Monday gave me two hours. Tuesday, maybe three if I could squeeze the morning in. Then I took my task list and plotted it directly onto those open hours.

Some days, I discovered, had zero capacity. Not because I was slacking. Because the time simply wasn't there.

Try it and let me know how it works for you. It felt like a small revelation: I don't struggle with things that are already on my calendar. I struggle with the things I need to fit in around them.

When I map that out ahead of time, the time doesn't disappear on me. When I don't, I lose it. I end up spending more energy staring at the list than actually working through it.

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The Recalibration Question

Once you can see your time clearly, it's worth doing what I'm doing right now: going back to the goals you set in January and honestly asking if this goal is still worth pushing for.

I always want stretch goals. But a goal that was set seven months ago shouldn't become something that beats you down. The goal itself was never really the point.

What matters is what reaching for it makes you do. So I don't want a goal to sit there defeating you, but I do want it to still be enough of a stretch to matter for the five and a half months we've got left.

There are two directions recalibration can go:

Recalibrate down, if the goal you set is no longer realistic and holding onto it would leave you defeated rather than motivated. That's not failure — that's honesty.

My job is to be faithful and do the work. The results aren't mine to control. I set the goal to motivate the effort, and at some point, I let go of the outcome.

Recalibrate up, if you're already on target and hitting the same number won't actually stretch you anymore. Coasting for the rest of the year isn't the goal either.

Say you set a sales goal back in January and you're a little past halfway there right now. If pushing for the rest of it would leave you defeated by December, that's recalibrate down. If you know you could blow past it and hitting the same number again wouldn't stretch you at all, that's recalibrate up. Either way, you're being honest about the goal instead of just coasting on the one you set seven months ago.

We never want to end the year with a defeated spirit. We want to find the wins, even if the win is admitting a goal needs to change.

If the calendar piece is the easy part and the harder question is what's happening underneath it — revenue, expenses, how your time and your numbers actually connect — that's the conversation a strategy session is built for.

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Where Are You?

I'd love to hear two things: if you tried the reverse calendaring approach, and where you land on your January goals. Are they within reach? Are they going to defeat you if you keep pushing? Or are you further ahead than you expected, and it's time to raise the bar?

Hit reply, or if you'd rather talk it out loud, leave me a voice message on Voxer. I'd love to hear from you — and cheer you on either way.