I’ve been logging my time for 9+ years now, always on spreadsheets that break the 168-hour week into 336 30-minute blocks (you can download various versions here). I often have my laptop with me, so it’s easy enough to write what I’ve been doing a few times per day.

However, I do not always have my laptop with me. For instance, this weekend we went to visit family in Cape Cod. I didn’t want to bother with the computer. However, given that I always have my phone with me, it was easy enough to email myself a written description of how I spent my time every 12 hours or so. I then put this into the spreadsheet on my laptop this morning (and yes, I know I could have worked things out to input directly on the spreadsheet from my phone but this way works too…). I got a record of how I spent my time and I wasn’t tied to my computer. If I’d been off my phone all weekend I could have written down notes on a sheet of paper and that would have worked too. But I tend not to be off my phone for days at a time!

Anyway, my time log from this past weekend showed a lot of time in the car. On Friday I was driving all over the place to kid events. A great many weeklong day camps have some sort of showcase on Friday. The 14-year-old also needed to go work on his projects for a technology competition he’s going to this week. The 9-year-old had an appointment. Then in the evening, my husband, the 14-year-old and I went downtown for a Phillies game! This was on my summer fun list — and while it was still fairly hot at 7 p.m., and the Phillies lost, the game was indeed fun. We sat on the third base line just a few rows back and enjoyed our hot dogs and left by the 8th inning in order to beat the traffic…because we had to be up early to be back in the car!

My husband’s brother’s family has kids fairly close in age to my older four. In particular, the 12-year-old is very close with her cousin of matching age. The family offered to host her for a week at their beach house in Massachusetts, so we all drove up to visit and drop her off.

It was a lot of driving for a short trip. We left at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday and arrived at about 2:30 p.m. — and that was with fairly minimal traffic. We left at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday and didn’t get home until 9:30 p.m. (That was with more traffic!) But the ocean was beautiful and it was fun to visit, with the upside that Cape Cod was about 75 degrees while everywhere else on the east coast was 95 degrees. We went in the well-heated pool + hot tub on Saturday and everyone else went on a boat on Sunday morning that had a capacity of 12 — meaning one person had to be left behind. I sacrificed myself (trying not to appear too eager as I did so) and hung out for a lovely 2 hours by myself, looking out at the waves and thinking semi-deep thoughts. Then I met up with everyone else for bowling and lunch before getting back in the van to drive home.

This week promises to be reasonably chill — and next weekend won’t involve as much driving. My husband will be meeting them in NYC to retrieve our daughter so that is much closer!

If you can just take the time off and be gentle to yourself, great. But if that’s not going to happen, here’s another idea. If you can’t work, plan. Using low-energy time to think about what Future You could do can turn what might feel like wasted time into something more fruitful.

This realization is how Friday became my weekly planning day (see Tranquility by Tuesday Rule #2: Plan on Fridays). Many of us who work a Monday to Friday week are pretty much sliding into the weekend by Friday. It can be hard to start anything new, particularly after lunch. But I realized that I might be willing to think about what Future Me should be doing. It takes less effort to write “revise book proposal” on a planner page than it does to actually, you know, revise that book proposal. So I began creating the next week’s plans on Friday, trusting that Monday Morning Me would have more vim and vigor for these things than whatever I’d morphed into by Friday afternoon.

This insight can work for all kinds of planning. If you’re spinning your wheels on Thursday afternoon you could take a stab at a weekend plan. If you’re feeling like you’re banging your head against the wall you could regroup and write a Summer Fun List, or a List of 100 Dreams, or do something random like plan next year’s holiday vacation. Or plan something completely unrelated to your current slump… like next November’s podcast episode topics?

Perhaps the sense of devising a plan will feel energizing. That energy might help you get going on something else. But even if not, now you’ve got a plan for next weekend. Or a Summer Fun List. Or next November’s podcast line-up. Those are things that didn’t exist before, and probably should happen at some point. Productivity is all mental anyway. If you feel like you should be getting something done, and then you do get something done, whatever that something happens to be, that tends to register as a win.

A definite highlight: Running the Philadelphia Zoo 5k with my 15-year-old (who is almost 16 — that is happening very soon…). The weather was absolutely perfect, sunny and warm enough not to wear jackets (which we had brought…) but not hot. I wound up carrying both of our jackets through the race. But we did it — three loops – one inside the zoo, then one outside, then back in. As we raced through the zoo paths a pair of zebras was running in loops in their exhibit, getting into the spirit. A few monkeys and some of the llamas were staring at all of us. Definitely a new twist on the usual running spectators! We finished, got to Starbucks, and I still made it to church at 10. This is the upside of 5ks as a race length.

I went to the local library on Saturday and got a few coffee table type books on garden and design. These are good to get from the library as they are bulky and expensive! I spent a nice hour yesterday reading through one on Virginia Woolf’s garden. Apparently Leonard Woolf got quite into gardening at their Monk House and her diaries have various entries on what she saw out her writing studio window. It is now preserved and open to the public on occasion. Maybe another place to visit.

We celebrated Cinco de Mayo a little late by going out Sunday night with the two older boys for dinner at our local Mexican restaurant. We were able to sit outside, which is just always a treat. I am looking forward to many more meals outside this summer.

In the spirit of Tranquility by Tuesday Rule #8: Batch the little things, I also did what I called a “Stuffy clinic.” Some children’s special stuffed animals had various rips on the seams so I sat down and sewed four of them in one fell swoop. Good as new!

What I’ve wound up doing the last two weekends is splitting my long run into two parts. This past Saturday, for instance, I ran in my neighborhood from 7 a.m. to 8:25 a.m. I then took my 7-year-old to his 9 a.m. karate class. After getting him situated, I ran around that neighborhood for another 20 minutes. The weekend before I had run an hour with a friend in the morning, and then ran 30 minutes later in the morning with my 15-year-old.

Is it as good as running 90 minutes or 105 minutes consecutively? Possibly not. But in terms of training I assume it’s better than not adding on the second run.

I’ve been doing the same as I practice my new speech. With a new book out this fall, it’s time to switch up my material. Running through the whole speech requires 40 uninterrupted minutes when my voice isn’t tired. I’ve done that a few times, but I’ve increased the volume of my practicing by viewing the six chunks of the speech as separate entities. I practiced two before bed the other night (which was about all I could muster). I did another section in the car on the way to my audiobook recording yesterday. And so on.

Long, uninterrupted chunks of time are great when we can get them. Unfortunately, for various reasons, those chunks might not always be available. When that’s the case, it’s tempting to think that we can’t get anything done. But life is seldom either/or, and perfect doesn’t need to be the enemy of the good. It might be possible to get things done in little pieces. Little pieces, over time, add up.

The leaves are pretty close to peak around here. A few weekend highlights: I took the 12-year-old out for a sushi lunch on Friday (the kids had a half day)….and then took a nap to recover from my ridiculous Thursday night O’Hare-plus-hotel experience. I ran 6 miles with Jane along a river trail on Saturday morning. We went for a family walk along a trail and through a local cemetery. We went to Dutch Wonderland’s Halloween event on Sunday. This little amusement park in Lancaster isn’t exactly Disney World, but the kids had a surprisingly good time. I think it helped that it wasn’t crowded so they could go on whatever rides they wanted whenever they wanted.

And, finally, trick-or-treating! We had a vampire, an inflatable dinosaur, another vampire, a ninja, and an adorable little lion. The dog pretty much refused to wear his pumpkin costume, so that was that. We did two local neighborhoods where the houses are close together and the streets quiet. Some people went all out, though I was surprised at the number of houses that put a bowl of candy outside rather than have kids ring the doorbell. We tend to do this — because we are out and about with our own kids — but we’re talking houses that had done fairly elaborate get-ups in the past. Maybe this is the new post-Covid world, where people look for ways to limit interaction.

Now it is November. This always happens the day after Halloween, though it seems to sneak up on me nonetheless. I think November is an under-rated month, with the leaves at their peak at the start, and the month ending in a cozy holiday vibe. Unfortunately, it’s also going to start getting pretty cold. And I will just be cold again until May….

I can’t say all my kids loved it, but we can never get 100 percent agreement on anything. After some initial grumbling about getting in the car, they’d generally tolerate the experience, and everyone got some fresh air and exercise.

Now, as almost all of our activities have ramped back up, I am aiming to keep family walks in our lives. This requires some strategy. I don’t think any of my children are individually over-scheduled, but there are four of them who are old enough to be enrolled in things. Four times a small number gives you…a bigger number.

So my goal is to look at each weekend ahead of time and figure out how best to preserve a chunk of open space. This past weekend we had soccer and swim on Saturday morning, and softball evaluations, church events, and tennis on Sunday. But all our Saturday stuff was done by lunch time. So we made plans to drive to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, which I had heard good things about, and which — despite being 75 minutes from our house — I’d never visited.

It was a lot of fun! We hiked a “River of Rocks” trail that had the kids scrambling on boulders, and playing in a rhododendron grove by a stream. Since there was still snow in patches, but the air felt like spring, this added a whimsical element to the walk. Plus, we saw hawks circling near a lookout.

We got in the car at 12:45 p.m. We got home at 5:45 p.m., having had the “big adventure” I aim to experience each week.

While Saturday afternoon worked this time, my guess is that in future weeks Sunday afternoons/early evenings will be our open space for trips/walks/adventures. Fewer events get scheduled then (since it’s a school night) and we are consciously choosing not to re-up something that had been scheduled on the later side. It might not always work, but some weeks it will. And some other weeks, soccer/baseball/etc. will get rained out, which opens up space for indoor options, as long as I have thought through contingencies.

In any case, weekends generally need not be either/or. It’s possible to make space for garden-variety kid activities and family outings. But doing so requires looking at the whole weekend landscape ahead of time and thinking about what would work. I’m pretty sure if we hadn’t had a plan to go to Hawk Mountain right after lunch on Saturday we would have wasted quite a bit of time figuring out what to do, negotiating decisions and so forth. And then a 5-hour chunk of a trip might not have seemed possible. By making that plan ahead of time, it turned out there was still time for a walk.