2019/20 – Doing Less – Plans

In the comments on the post about doing less, Gordon said

For your ‘busy’ do you get anxious when the calendar is empty, do you just like having ‘a plan’? Would it work if you planned an afternoon of deliberately doing nothing? (the challenge being to stick to it?)

It’s a bit more – and less – complicated than that.

I don’t need a full plan of “I’ll do [x], then [y], then [z]” for either a day or a weekend.  In general I’m happy with an outline idea, even if it’s just “I’ll go to London” or whatever.

However, I do like having at least that idea. A blank space in the calendar is an oddity, and it does leave me feeling uncomfortable.

The other side of it is that my time off is precious to me, my weekends are important. I make sure that I do all my domestic stuff during the week, I refuse to spend half of those important two days doing cleaning, laundry, shopping and so on. They’re my own days, and if I do nothing with them, I feel they’ve been wasted.

So long as I do *something* with them, I’m OK. And even ‘just’ spending a day at the cinema catching up on films counts as “doing something”, so my criteria are quite low on that basis.

It’s that balance I need to find, somewhere between going out – day trips and time away, seeing friends, that kind of thing – and just doing enough to appease my work ethic. I also probably should find a way to be able to class days of doing nothing as also somehow counting as doing something.

It’s not an easy balance to find, and I’m not quite sure how I’ll get it right, but I think it’s time to at least try…