Make a good day (almost) perfect

Tweak your schedule to add more fun

Frequent Vanderhack readers know that life is more fun when you have something you’re looking forward to. Hopefully you have something in the near future that you are gleefully anticipating — be it a concert, a trip to a football game, or dinner with an old friend.

If so, here’s a little life optimization hack: Put in a few more good things, and remove a few ho-hum things, from the day you’re looking forward to. We all have some discretion over our schedules, and by putting more good stuff into an already good day, you can go from happiness to happiness all day long.

So, for instance, let’s say you get massages every two months or so, and you also have tickets to see a favorite band on a particular night. You could try scheduling your massage for the day you go to the concert, so as you’re relaxing on the massage table your thoughts can be churning with excitement about the concert happening in a few hours.

Or maybe you’ve got tickets to a football game on a Saturday afternoon. Could you have breakfast that morning with a good friend?

Or perhaps you’ve scored a coveted reservation at a great restaurant for a Friday night. Could you plan to take a longer lunch break and go walk on that gorgeous trail that’s not too far from your office?

By doubling, or even tripling the number of good things that happen on an anticipated day, you can make it even more memorable. You can also consciously move some not-so-fun stuff out of the day. Let’s say that you normally file expense reports on Fridays and you really dislike doing so. Maybe the week you’ve got the hot dinner reservation you could file those reports on Thursday, so Friday has more space for bliss.

Now of course the one caveat here is that when you stack up a lot of good things on one particular day, you run the risk of something going wrong. If you wind up with the flu on the day you have a massage, lunch with a good friend, and concert tickets, that will be triply painful. But on the other hand, if you have lots of good stuff scheduled, and something goes wrong with one of the events — say the concert is canceled due to rain — you can at least console yourself with your lunch and massage. You won’t feel quite so disappointed about one thing not happening.

In any case, I think it’s a fun game to try to tweak a schedule for optimal enjoyment. And, as we consciously try to plan more good stuff into an already good day, we can see a certain truth — we have the power to make good things happen when we try. Maybe that can nudge us to try to make good things happen more often.