5 ways to keep busy in August

August is a strange month, isn't it? At my company, Paessler, August 2014 was actually our most successful month of that year – by far! However this is highly unusual, in my experience. Normally you would expect automatic out of office responses by the bucketful and mobile phones going straight to voicemail. Marketing campaigns? Waste of time.

So how should those of us in the working world who don’t have children, and are not sunning ourselves in far flung climes, amuse ourselves during the barren wilderness that is the month of August? Here are 5 ideas.

1. Back stuff up

If there is one thing most people forget to do, or can’t be bothered to do, it’s backing up their data. In a work environment, lots of things are stored centrally thanks to Exchange, Sharepoint and so on, however I would bet a shilling or three that most of us have stuff lying around on old laptops, hard drives, USB keys, phones, CD-ROMs, maybe even floppy disks, that we want to keep. Wouldn't it be nice to have it all in one place, secure and available in the cloud?

I had a slightly aging hard drive plus an old laptop that I wanted to retain the contents of. 75 dollars and about 2 weeks of uploading later and my entire 50 odd GB digital world was in cyberspace, easily accessible from anywhere. The upload happened pretty much unnoticed in the background once the initial recce was complete, although decent bandwidth is to be recommended.

I know, there are some security concerns around cloud-based storage but, to be honest, the convenience far outweighs the risks, don’t you think? There’s an infinitely higher likelihood of me dropping my technology into places technology shouldn’t be dropped than someone stealing my plans for getting on Dragons’ Den off my Dropbox account.

2. Enrol for evening classes

September is just around the corner and you know what that means. Post-work golf becomes a quick 9 holes at best, we are subjected to the annual re-hash of mind-numbing Cowellian singing / dancing / random talent shows and we all get to whinge about the supermarkets punting the joys of Christmas too early.

Oh – and the new school year kicks off. Which is a very good or a very bad thing, depending on whether you have children and/or use the M25 much.

So why not embrace the end of summer by learning a new language? Or doing a photography course? Or even finding out about Car Maintenance or Waxing Techniques or Safe Use of Ladders or Neuro-linguistic Programming?

Evening classes are no longer what they say, you know. All “that” stuff happens online now, just ask Ashley Madison. People do actually go to these things to widen their horizons these days and they're taking registrations now!

3. Move house

The roads are quiet (unless you live in Cornwall, where they cleverly decided to start the long-awaited widening of the A30 just in time to catch not only this year's tourist season, but also next year's!). Removal companies are quiet, therefore cheaper. And you can get all of those pesky administrative tasks, such as changing your address, redirecting mail and sending off final meter readings, ticked off in peace!

What do you mean we should be working? Hey, a happy employee is a good employee, right? And moving house is the second most stressful thing in life...

4. Get your pension sorted out

The days of joining a company as a starry-eyed apprentice and departing 40 years later, with a carriage clock under your arm, amidst a volley of one-liners about bus passes and senior moments are long gone. A much more likely scenario is that you’ve, well…, been around the block a bit, so to speak. You know, you took some offers that were too good to turn down. You were ambitious and wanted to progress your career. In which case, alongside all the burnt bridges and awkward Christmas party memories, you may have also left a multitude of corporate pensions in your wake.

So why not aggregate them all into a SIPP – a self-invested personal pension? The paperwork isn’t particularly taxing if you’ve managed to hang onto the odd statement over the years. You simply fill out a few forms and the money is moved across into the SIPP account on your behalf by the company you’ve requested manage it.

There are all sorts of tax benefits and you can get the experts to invest your moolah wisely for you. Best Invest and Hargreaves Lansdown are specialists in this area.

5. Write a post for LinkedIn

In this way you provide a service to people who have nothing to do in August by giving them something to read and thereby reducing their overall August boredom time by 5 minutes.

And you might just get a few more views on your LinkedIn profile and thereby not lose the competition you may or may not be having with a colleague about how many views on your LinkedIn profile you can get before the end of August.