New Year’s Resolution - enjoy my weekends

I thought a lot about my resolution this year. I’d like it to be challenging, but not obviously impossible so I don’t set myself up for failure. I decided I’m going to work on better enjoying my weekends.

I like the structure and the rhythm of the workday. It organizes my restless energy in a way that unstructured open time does not. The weekend does weird things to me. I meditate every weekday before work. Even though I have all day each weekend day, I typically never quite get to meditating on the weekend. There’s something too easy about procrastinating the important stuff with unstructured time. Somehow I don’t do the things I know will make me happy (meditation, exercise) and instead feel restless and bored. As awful as it sounds, I think I need to schedule my weekends a little bit!

I felt relieved/vindicated when I saw a recent lifehack.org post “12 Tips to Improve the Quality of Your Free Time” that discussed how people confess that they “felt happier on the job, even though they said they would rather be at home.”

So this year I am resolving to improve my free time. I am not planning to work on the weekend, that seems like a cop-out. Instead, I want to be a bit more intentional and systematic about my free time. Not super structured, I just want to make sure that I give myself just enough structure to do what I want. Specifically, along with the previously scheduled exercise and housework I want to plan in some activities:

• find some nonpunitive and relaxing beauty ritual I like,
• schedule a longer meditation 1x/weekend,
• study yoga more seriously,
• read,
• make sure I get outside - take a long walk in the snow, cross country ski on the golf course (I miss having Gillian around for a ski and conversation partner, I need to locate a stand-in),
• put some of that restless energy to good use by volunteering somewhere, and
• scheduling some creative time gardening, cooking, knitting, writing, photography.

I’m going to start small, by scheduling a few things in advance on weekends this January. I’ll blocking some time for creative activities (garden planning, figuring out what to do with the fuzzy fuschia yarn that has refused to become a raglan crewneck sweater), signing up for a class: winter photography at the Botanical Gardens 1/20/2007, and checking out some local Sierra Club events. That’s probably plenty for now.

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