I know for some people summer can be incredibly busy, but that’s not the case in my household. A lot of our activities take a break for the summer, and sometimes one or more of my kids will be gone for a week or two. Fewer people generate less stuff on the calendar!
If your life is like mine, than you might know that life will get busy again soon enough. Here are some things to do before your schedule gets full to make life more calm and productive in the future.
1. Think about what you did with the open time. It takes me a few weeks every summer to realize that my schedule is actually more open. But eventually the signs are there. My planner page for each week has fewer already-scheduled activities. The family schedule for the week or the weekend fits on one page rather than two. If time has felt a little more open for you, what did you do with it? Try to figure this out. In many cases the answer is “not much of note,” but one of the reasons I encourage people to track their time is that you can see where the time goes. During the summer I no longer have choir on Monday nights and Thursday nights, and yet Monday and Thursday nights happened regularly, all summer long. I can see that what filled this space is pool time, reading, puzzles, and random scrolling, for the most part, which is good to know. I generally can make space for reading and puzzles even when life is busy. The key is spending less time on scrolling. I enjoyed spending time in the pool and so I’m pondering how to keep getting outside in the evening even when there’s no obvious reason to do so. Once you know where your time went, you can ponder what you’d like to keep, what you don’t, and what might have to change.
