Huzzah! Doing this right now was inspired by an episode of Before Breakfast.
Every so often it happens: I come up for air, like a seal or a swimmer suddenly popping up to survey the coastline and check how far they are from shore, and suddenly realize I Must Reschedule All The Things.
And so, this time: day six of vacation, week four of meditation (twice daily! but that’s a subject for another post), and I found myself neatly laying out days in a notebook, Monday to Sunday, and blocking in my Ideal Realistic Week.
Here it is:
The exact layout was inspired partially by realizing that once the Horrible House Remodel is complete, there’s no reason I can’t occasionally work from home in the morning, then stop by the nearby Barre3 studio for a class on my way in to work in the afternoon. I’ve also been thinking about how to minimize context-switching, whether between 30-minute, back-to-back meetings, or between those meetings, email, and strategy or deeper work. And I wanted to figure out when to write – I have this nagging urge to do so, but I’ve never found a time or a rhythm that feels comfortable, and increasingly I feel that I had better do this now – and how to make better use of my Friday evenings (I know, I know – Friday evenings shouldn’t be hard, but whatever – for me, a person largely allergic to planning ahead, they are).
And so, the ideal.
Of course, an ideal is only an ideal. Weeks vary; constraints change (oh, how I wish I could control all the meetings at work! and never need to go to the dentist; or have the car break down); but it was useful to lay this out. I realized I need just as much time for email & followups as I do for actual strategic work; that I wanted time for work-related reading; that if I’m not doing something social on a Friday night, going for a walk and then doing some writing might be a good alternative. And I set up my work days as basically having two halves, one morning, one afternoon, and putting meetings in only one half each.
This week is vacation, so for the weekdays, I have no intention of following my plan 🙂 For the weekend and next week… I just might.
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