Its official:  summer has arrived! For me, summer isn’t really about a set date on the calendar or hitting a particular temperature on the thermometer. Nope. For me, summer is all about the last day of school. When school ends summer begins.

We’re on day four of summer 2009, and so far, so good. The kids begged and pleaded with us not to send them to Y camp this summer. We (finally) agreed after reaching the conclusion that childhood is too short and there are too few summers to turn it into something dreaded—something that you’re just trying to get through. Luckily, we have options…so we decided to explore some of them. Enter plan B.

Plan B is for the kids to attend some specialty camps that they *want* to attend, not camps they *have* to attend. The goal is to 1) give Mom and Dad some work time, and 2) give the kids some mental and physical stimulation that doesn’t involve the T.V. or any sort of video game. The one drawback to this plan is that we’ll be spending quite a bit of time driving kids to and from camps. And every week is a different schedule. This can keep things interesting, but also makes it difficult to really get into a routine, at least during regular waking hours.

Then, the buffet syndrome set in. All the camps looked really great so we kept saying yes, and piling our plate full of camps! When I put all the dates on the calendar, added the baseball and softball schedules, and guitar lessons…I gasped. “What have I done?” I’ve completely overbooked us!

See, we all have different comfort zones. For me, white space on a calendar, unscheduled down-time is good. It is comfortable. I like breathing room and space…and plan B didn’t leave much downtime.

Enter plan C. I realized I had to carve out some uninterrupted, focused work time. Looking at the calendar there wasn’t going to be too much opportunity for that during the standard work day. Sure, there are blocks of time, some longer than others. But, each day has built-in interruptions, and that doesn’t even take into account the unexpected (yet inevitable) interruptions that come with working in a home office. This is fine for some kinds of work that I do…but doesn’t work great for writing which is the primary “in office” task for many of my projects this summer.

Plan C entails rearranging my schedule—the times of day I have most control over—so it puts me back into my comfort zone. The times of day I have control over are at night when the kids are in bed and first thing in the morning when everyone is still asleep. Morning is my best writing time, so plan C involves putting the power of the early morning to work for me. My plan is to get up every day this summer at 5 AM for some quiet, focused, uninterrupted writing time.

As I said above—so far, so good. I’m on day 4 of this new plan and four days into creating a new habit. I’m using Twitter to hold myself accountable, reporting each morning that I did in fact get up at 5 AM!

All of it is working really well. I love the quiet time…in fact morning is fast becoming my favorite part of the day. And Twitter is working well as my “accountability partner.” This morning, as I contemplated staying in bed just a bit longer, the thought of sharing on Twitter that I didn’t get up at 5 AM was enough motivation to drag my tired self out of bed and get to work! So far, so good.

The moral of the story is this. Sometimes we have to create new routines that push us out of our comfort zone in one area of our life (getting out of bed at 5 AM…out of my normal comfort zone) so that we can create a new comfort zone somewhere else. It’s important when creating routines and changing your schedule to know yourself and know its okay that some things work for you and some things don’t.

It’s OK that I need breathing room in my schedule. If I simply beat myself up and said “You should be able to do all this!” all summer long, I’d be frustrated all summer long! That’s no fun. It’s much more fun to try an approach that seems on paper as if it will work well for you, and then, set in place some means to be accountable for making it happen.

How about you? Are you in need of some new routines due to the summer or to accomplish something else important to you? If so, I’d love to hear what you’re working on and what you’re doing to make fit it in! Remember, embrace what works best for you and then, find an accountability system that motivates you to make it happen! Good luck!!

Oh, and if you want to follow my progress on the 5 AM plan via Twitter, you can follow me here.