95 - What Does Your Ideal Week Look Like?
What Does Your Ideal Week Look Like?
I’m continuing in my month of feeding my spirit to engage in some planning and dreaming exercises that help me live more intentionally. I’m also continuing to explore some of the notes I took from 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam which I talked about in last week’s newsletter.
This week, I’m revisiting one of my favorite exercises which isn’t mentioned in Vanderkam’s book, but which definitely relates to the topic. That exercise is the Ideal Week exercise. The Ideal Week exercise involves writing out a plan for your Ideal Week. You can define “Ideal” in a lot of different ways for this exercise. For example, your ideal week might be the ideal balance between time spent dedicated to your personal pursuits, your family and relationship pursuits, and your vocational pursuits. Or, your ideal week might be the “if money were no object” version of an ideal week. Or it might be something in between those two versions. So, again, you decide what ideal is.
Making a plan that puts in all the different things you would do with your week is an important step. It’s also hard so give yourself some grace if you realize you can’t even fit everything you feel you have to do into the week. That’s where the second part of the exercise comes from. The biggest value comes when you take action based off of that written version of your ideal week. Doing this exercise over the years has led me to:
resign from a couple of boards that weren’t serving me well.
make time to try out a few different volunteer experiences to see if I liked them.
make more time for reading and less time for watching television or doom scrolling on my phone.
make exercise a regular part of my daily life (which I need to do again).
take art and drawing classes.
not apply for “traditional” jobs and continue my consulting business.
The exercise helps you to see your week in more realistic terms and to recognize more clearly where your boundaries need to be - or at least where you want to get them to.
You can download templates for this exercise in my community. The templates are available for free to the public. You can join the community as well. There is a free version or a paid version. Join for the price you want to pay - use code CHOOSE followed by 10, 20, etc. to choose your discount amount.
I’d love to hear if you give this a try and what you learn from it.
Some Things You Might Find Interesting
What I published: Nada, zip, zilch.
Keep Up With My Cancer Journey: Mostly the same this week as last week although I have chemo 5 of 6 on Wednesday. Didn’t get my cycle 4 post done last week like I’d hoped so have it on my list again for this week. If you’d like to follow along in more detail on this journey, you can request access to my Cancer Journey website at https://www.mylifeline.org/invitation/Monroe4702670/c4d9a0945939697870a9267ec2cd951230b25b0e9f023ca466233659967b5e46
Inheritance by Nora Roberts. I had a “skip the line” opportunity to read Nora Roberts’ new book Inheritance this past week. Occasionally when I’m looking up books from my library in the Libby app there will be these books you can get for a much shorter time frame than normal and you get to “skip the line”. I got one of those this past week and just devoured the book. If you like a little paranormal ghost story with your romance, this is a great book for you. I love how the ghosts in this book are characters in and of themselves which makes the book far less creepy and eerie and much more mysterious and interesting. The trailer isn’t much, but I’ll share it anyway. Be warned, book 2 of the trilogy doesn’t come out until November so you’ve got to wait quite a while for the next installment in the trilogy.
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