Ideal Days

Hey - It’s Michael.

Had some extraordinary intense weeks - now back after well-needed rest. Enjoy the newsletter!

It’s the end of a job, a relationship or a year and yet another situation that prompts you to reflect on what has happened. Maybe it’s just a mellow feeling of discontent.

The reason does not matter, the effect is the same: you can’t really remember where the time went. Sure, there were some special days, yet other days seem to be grey clouds of nothingness and it feels like - once again - you wasted the precious time that was given to you.

There is a solution: choose how to spend your days.

Instead of always chasing or regretting good days - and leaving it to luck whether you experience them - design them.

Principle:

Design your ideal day and live ruthlessly according to it.

This of course requires clarity regarding your goals & thus priorities in life. Knowing what is important to you, good for you and gives you energy will help a tremendous deal in clarifying how your days should look like.

In turn, it surely helps to know what you do not want. Which activities suck energy & time and are neither healthy nor give you any long term benefits.

The more accurately you can describe where you want to go in life, the more accurately you can design your days to get there.

Conversely, you might just find out that how you need to spend your days to get where you want to go, is not how you want to spend your days.

During a calm hour - with an open mind - take a blank page and write down all the things you want to do and need to do in a given ideal day. Add the minutes or hours to the activities. Then, arrange them in an order that makes sense to you and - if possible - block them during certain timeframes of the day, just like in a calendar.

As a starter: write down the basics: sleep, eating, exercise, body care. Think about work, social interaction, fun, creativity,..

You’ll find that you either have too many or too little activities to do for 24h in a day. Both cases force you to clarify what’s really important to you & how you actually want to spend your life.

When you do the exercise, ignore the voices that tell you it’s impossible or selfish - it’s your life and you choose how you spend it.

Also try to compare your ideal day to your current days. Is there a stark difference? If so, maybe it’s time to make some changes - for which it is never too late.

Also ask yourself whether this ideal day is taking you towards your dream life. If the answer is no, you may need to adapt either your goals or your ideal day.

The concept can of course be extended to ideal weeks (because there are different ideal days: work days, fun days, rest days,..), ideal months, ideal quarters, ideal years,…

Personally, I’ve been reinventing my ideal days (& weeks) for a few years now and I still learn about myself and it still makes my days better than before.

“How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives.” - Annie Dillard

Am I living or am I trying to justify my existence?

See you next week - Michael