Take a daily virtual vacation

Use bits of time for dreaming and scheming

Through the day, we all have small bits of time that are hard to use well. You’re waiting for a phone call to start. You finish one assignment and have stuff you need to do, but you need some mental transition time. You’re waiting for the pasta to boil as you’re cooking dinner.

I know what we all do with what author Brigid Schulte calls “time confetti.” We pick up our phones and start scrolling through social media or reading panic-inducing headlines.

It’s understandable. But we can use some of this time confetti for dreaming bigger dreams. A great way to do that? Take a daily virtual vacation.

Get specific

Start keeping a list of places you’d like to visit. Maybe you created a List of 100 Dreams with your own bucket list destinations. Or you can get a book such as National Geographic’s Journeys of a Lifetime, or 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.

Each day, choose a spot on one of these lists, or keep studying a spot you chose previously. Search for photos online. There are great photo sites, but even just searching on Instagram with the hash tag #EiffelTower will give you all sorts of angles on the place. Read through luxury hotel descriptions and reviews. With a virtual vacation, it doesn’t matter if you can’t afford it! Look at photos of those first class cabins for international flights. Pretty swanky — and a great diversion from the news.

As you get into the habit of taking daily virtual vacations, you’ll start seeing new ways to engage in these journeys. Lots of art museums have photos of their major works online. You can visit the Prado virtually and study a new painting each day. Major zoos and aquariums post videos of animal feedings. You can sort through photos and videos of national parks. Reading through travel blogs or travel narratives can be fun as well. Watch videos of people going on roller coasters.

Making the virtual real

When you go on these daily virtual vacations, take notes on what looks really cool…because some of these trips might be doable at some point in life! Spend two weeks taking a daily virtual vacation to different sites in Yosemite National Park, for instance, and you’ll figure out an itinerary that will work when you do visit. You’ll be ahead of the game on travel planning, and you’ll build some anticipation into your life.

But even if you don’t ever wind up going, looking at gorgeous scenery is a much better way to spend ten minutes than reading angry social media comments. So you may as well give yourself a mini-vacation by taking a virtual one.