I came home and then mostly finished the wrapping. There are only a few small items left to do. The sibling presents (minus the 15-year-old’s since he ordered online for delivery today or tomorrow) are under the real, more informal tree (my kids call this the “tree of the people.”). The family presents for Christmas day are under the “fancy tree”  (the fake one with all white/silver/gold lighting and ornaments). My extended family’s presents are in my office, to be taken out when they show up this weekend.

I’m thinking maybe next year a goal could be to finish more of the shopping earlier. I start to feel more relaxed about Christmas when everything is procured and wrapped. So if this was done at Thanksgiving, December could mostly be about experiences.

Easier said than done of course, as people change their minds about their Christmas lists, and there are more gift-oriented items on sale by December. But something to think about.

In the meantime, here is a currently-unnamed sonnet. Looking for something catchy as a title!

Before the stars, before the planets set
into their orbits, which define a day
and year, then what was time? The alphabet
came after words, one could still chance to say

“I love you” never knowing what was “v”
or “l” or what it meant to write a thought.
These constructs come after the thing, we see
our rules imposed on things existing not

because of rules — and yet, how good to know
that if we say we’ll meet at 3 p.m.
at the appointed point of spin we’ll go
to our shared spot on earth and on a whim

we’ll write each other notes, sweet nothings, such —
these lines that mean so little and so much.

That was a little harder yesterday as I spent a lot of time compulsively refreshing the flight status for my 14-year-old’s flight back from Florida. (He is there for a technology competition.) It was delayed and delayed and eventually wound up canceled. The earliest the airline can get the crew back is Tuesday. I am picturing their teacher chaperones dealing with a bunch of middle schoolers potentially running out of patience and clean socks…

For the most part, though, June was pretty good. It certainly had a lot going on. I feel like I was gone a lot but I was only in a hotel or elsewhere 5 nights out of 30 so that’s not really that much.

I began the month headed to NYC for my brother-in-law’s 50th — a trip that involved seeing Six and eating at Aquavit (always a favorite).

That week featured a lot of kid events: school picnics, the third grade wax museum, the sixth grade “genius hour,” etc. That weekend we hosted the church choir party and went to multiple recitals on the same day.

The next week brought the 8th grade graduation, some end-of-year celebratory lunches, and then my trip into NYC with the 17-year-old. We saw MJ (I’m getting to be a Broadway regular!), enjoyed a sunset river cruise, and seeing the top of One Vanderbilt. I also enjoyed running around the reservoir in Central Park (on my Summer Fun List!).

The next week brought the start of various day camps, extreme heat (but early morning runs), and then a night at Citizens Bank Park watching the Phillies. This was also on the Summer Fun List! We made our epic drive to Cape Cod that weekend where, among other things, I bowled for possibly the first time in 15 years.

This past week has been somewhat lower key, though I did go for a bike ride on the Schuylkill River Trail and went to a beer garden (both on the Summer Fun List). My husband met my brother-in-law in NYC to get our daughter back after her week with cousins and they saw The Outsiders, so it really has been a Broadway month…

My day this Saturday with the 9-year-old was fairly uneventful. He really, really did not want to leave the house. I got him to go to the farmers’ market for a sub-40 minute trip, door to door. (Visiting a farmers market was on the Summer Fun List…). He had my assurance it would be quick because I only put a single quarter in the parking meter… But there were some little adventures while we were there — he scored the last two soft pretzels from one vendor and got some apple cider, I bought sourdough bread, and met a Best of Both Worlds listener! I must have been talking loudly or something and she recognized my voice because all of a sudden I heard “Are you Laura Vanderkam?” How fun. The 9-year-old and I played ping pong at one point in the afternoon but other than that he was probably on screens all day. I took an hour-plus nap. The next day we entertained a friend of his who was visiting from California with his mom — part of the serendipity of life. They met while skiing over spring break and have been virtual video game buddies since. They were taking a family vacation up the eastern seaboard this month so we got to connect.

Now, on to July! There will be a lot of shuttling kids to camp this month. Three children are doing overnight camps, which is exciting, but of course they have to get there and back — my camp spreadsheet did not really capture this reality of weekends spent in transit.

But there’s a lot to look forward to as well. Sarah will be visiting me (well, and her entire family, but how fun that they only live a few miles from me!) I’ve got two speeches this month, and my daughter and I will be going to a fun concert together (not Taylor Swift). I might spend some time today brainstorming other things I hope to make happen, because once July is over, then summer is moving into the “Sunday” stage of things.

As of now, though, there is still a lot of time. Now if only I can get my kid back from Florida….

ADDENDUM: I forgot to put this in the original post! I’m looking for people to participate in an evening hour time study as part of the research for my next book. Participating while involve taking a few short surveys (generally between 3-10 minutes long) from July 11th-19th (roughly). I appreciate the help! You can sign up here. Just a quick note that I particularly need some more male participants — my readership tends to lean more female and I’d like to have some balance, so if you are reading this and are male or have a man in your life who might be interested, please pass this along. (More women are welcome to sign up too!)

Photo: Fantastic post-storm sunset yesterday

Now that we are back, time moves quicker through our normal routines. As in, wow, it’s already been a week since our last full day in Spain when we did the market plus cooking class, and got caught in the rainstorm coming back from Plaza Mayor…

This is, of course, one of the reasons to travel — to slow down the experience of time and make it more memorable in your reckoning. It’s also the reason to plan in adventures in general. (That said, I’ve been enjoying a reasonably quiet work week at my desk where I’m only dealing with my immediate workload and not trying to get ahead of a week where I wouldn’t be working…).

The end of March rounded out the end of Q1. I haven’t done strict quarterly planning this year. I more have a list of annual goals that I’m working on.

In many ways, Q1 has been good. I stuck with my Bach listening schedule and am well on my way to listening to all of his work in a year. I stuck with my sonnet writing schedule, cranking out one a week. Vanderhacks has now been up and running for several months and I haven’t missed a day yet (please subscribe! It’s free for four posts per week, and then the fifth is usually behind a paywall). I have mostly finished my book proposal. Shortly, that will be out of my hands. I’m excited to start working on the book itself. We had some pretty amazing travel, between the Disney extravaganza and the week in Spain (I also took a short trip to Naples in there too).

On the other hand, this quarter was hard. Most notably, the radiculopathy episode of January was just…ridiculous. I spent chunks of Q1 in severe pain, unable to walk. I did my course of steroids and multiple months of physical therapy. I do my exercises diligently. But…my back still hurts. When I do a lot of walking, I still wind up with pain down my leg. That’s basically where I was before the incident. So who knows, it could all happen again. I am happy that the timing was such that I was able to take two trips involving a ton of walking. These were not pain-free trips, but I was able to do them.

We are a few days into Q2. It is shaping up to be a very full quarter, though again, mostly good things. There will be a lot of kid activity…My two older boys are both going to a state technology competition for multiple days, and we’ll find out after that if they’ll go to the national one in June (there is entirely the awkward possibility that one will qualify and one won’t but…we will cross that bridge when we come to it). While we were in Spain we got a surprise email from the 14-year-old’s robotics coach that their team was chosen (by lottery) for a berth at the world competition. They hadn’t qualified at the previous competition level, so we thought the season was over, but I guess the coach put them on the wait list and some one else dropped out…fortunately the world competition is in Dallas and not in, like Singapore or something that would require even more last minute scrambling! (Though I’m guessing the kids would have loved an international trip…but my kid will already be missing a lot of school between the technology competition and this one). The 16-year-old and I will be singing in a performance of Brahms Requiem. The 12-year-old and I will be taking a big trip together — more on that after we go.

I had quite the laugh yesterday over something tax-related (believe it or not…). We need to make a reasonably large payment to the US Treasury. This is totally expected — all OK. But I did want to see if it would be OK to pay by personal check for this amount (as opposed to some other method), so I went seeking some guidance. The IRS helpfully informs us that “we can’t accept single check or money order amounts of $100 million or more.” Fortunately I don’t owe more than $100 million, so I think I’ll be OK

In the meantime, here’s a little sonnet, called “Equinox,” written in mid-March.

The warmth of March is fragile, mid-day sun
pulls buds from branches, green shoots from the ground.
The Lenten roses bloom, plums have begun
to pinken, periwinkle vines surround

the trees that feed on sunlight, but the chill
of evening leads to creeping, shivering hours.
The frost that threatens all this growing, still,
will wrap its icy fingers on the flowers.

So watch the forecast, wonder at this show
a battle absent from the blooms of June.
What wagers nature makes — she does not know
if winter lingers, or the heat comes soon.

She makes her bids, her courage on display
like daffodils that greet a cold March day.

Anyway, I’m about to embark on a portion of my Friday planning. I’ve actually started spreading this out recently. These days I create my priority list for the upcoming week on Thursdays. I fill out the blank weekly page in my planner with what I need (or want) to get done professionally and personally over the upcoming week. I then keep thinking about this in the back of my mind and spend a few minutes on Friday adjusting. On Thursday, I also create the detailed plan for the upcoming weekend — based on the loose plan that was made the previous Thursday/Friday. I send this to my husband and our older kids.

Then, on Friday, I create what I call the “activity schedule” for the upcoming week. This lists out who needs to drive who, and where and when. Much is the same week to week (so I can repeat a template) but there’s always *something* different or we may be down a driver, or down a car. I create this for the upcoming Monday to Friday week, and then I email it to everyone who needs to know it (I also print up a copy for the younger children to see).

In all this, of course, it’s easy to get stuck in the process. So I’m trying to remember to ask a few questions every time I create the marching orders.

For example, when I look toward the weekend, do I have something I am genuinely looking forward to? My “realistic ideal weekend” template involves some adults only fun, a long run, a family adventure, and singing with my choir. I’m not running long these days (I’m working on walking reasonable lengths of time…) but in general that’s the goal. I also look to see if each of the kids is doing something and what their weekends look like individually. This is more about the little kids as the big kids are in charge of their own social lives. (But sometimes I need to remind them to tell me if they have plans…)

Also, during the work week…do I have enough time to work? My work hour tallies often wind up bearing the brunt of any “extras” in the week, so sometimes I need to shift around the driving to make sure I get the time I need to run my business, or see if we need extra childcare. This is going to be even more complicated with my physical therapy appointments now. As you might imagine, it’s easiest to put them during the work day but…that means they’re during the work day.

Anyway, that’s what my planning is looking like now. It works for me. Mostly, people get where they need to go. Mostly, I end each week with all my priorities for the week crossed off. Mostly, I have some fun stuff in my life. Now, on to creating that driving schedule!

This is exactly what the Whitney English planner had: A lined blank page on the right, with the days of the week on the left (Monday to Sunday, and with Saturday/Sunday looking like real days, not tiny boxes). So I was planning to keep using this, but then Whitney English did not make a dated 2024 planner.

What to do? I searched around, and there was a thread on Reddit featuring other people with this exact same problem. Someone suggested a particular, mostly similar layout with Plum Paper (a customizable planner), and since it turned out Plum Paper was having a big Black Friday sale, I went for it.

The one problem? This layout has the blank page on the left, and the days of the week on the right. It is also slightly bigger than the Whitney English.

This wouldn’t seem like a big deal but…within a day of starting this planner I realized I was making my daily to-do list on a little accessory notebook. There were a few reasons for this. One is that I need to have my daily list close to me in order to use it. When I put the planner to the right of my laptop (which is where I usually put it), the daily part was far away from me. So it didn’t feel as useful. I could roll the weekly part around (and just have the planner half open – it’s a spiral) but then I couldn’t see the weekly part, and I like to see this to inform anything I add to the daily list, and also to cross off weekly priorities as they happened.

So then I tried moving the planner to the left side of my laptop. I moved my chair over and everything. But the way I have stuff arranged on my desk, I had to turn it perpendicular, which means the daily page is still far away from me. So I wind up just writing my daily to do list on the accessory notebook on my right.

Which is fine. Basically, I’m just using multiple planners. I like the Plum Paper cover (I chose it, after all, and it says LV…) and the weekly list page works. I’ve realized that my daily to-do list is a pretty disposable thing. I create it and cross everything off and then I don’t need to keep looking at it. A little notebook from Target is fine for that sort of thing.

As for the Whitney English…shortly after I bought the Plum Paper I saw that Whitney English was selling an undated planner with the week-on-a-page format. So I bought one (again, during a Black Friday sale) but since the Plum Paper + notebook can work I probably will just save that one for 2025.

Have you pondered the actual mechanics (like sides of a page, etc.) of your planning? I didn’t know how much a creature of habit I was until I realized what I was doing!

In other news: Yes, the photo of the Plum Paper spread illustrating this post was taken on my bed…where I am still confined. I have gotten up very few times today because every time I do I immediately regret it. This is all incredibly frustrating, for me and for my family that I cannot actively take care of. I guess maybe it might snow and lots of stuff will be canceled so the logistics of being down a parent/driver will be easier??

On the other hand, I am grateful for an incredibly flexible job. I’ve been doing all my immediate professional tasks from my bed. This would be much more inconvenient if I was, say, a dentist.

In the meantime, here’s a sonnet from a few weeks ago, called “Christmas Day.”

Two little boys exploring in the woods
The bigger one, he tends a secret spot
where winter-fleeing pirates store their goods
and long-time fallen branches start to rot

the little one, he tiptoes close behind
he follows where his brother clears a way
I hear them whisper, marvel where they find
a mushroom, brilliant spot in this decay

Inside, the shiny wrappings torn askew
the ribbons strewn beneath the glowing tree —
now pausing from these treasures bright and new
the older helps his brother look and see

these older gifts: A gentle, grubby hand,
a language only they will understand.

(For those wondering, I did make it to the birthday party on Monday. My pinched nerve pain had gotten a little better and then took a turn for the worse later but I was able to go and celebrate with the 9-year-old and many of his friends. This was at a large arcade and as I handed the kids the game cards I gave my little speech multiple times that I was trusting them not to leave the place as we didn’t have enough adults to follow everyone around. More than one kid said to me “but why would we leave? The video games are here!”)

Aside from the pain, life was conspiring to make getting both of us downtown for an 8:30 a.m. visit challenging. The kids were out of school for snow yesterday, and today our district had a 2-hour delay — slightly inconvenient, as they still needed to get to school, just at the wrong time… Remember the minivan is in the shop. I had also gotten an appointment to get my car serviced this morning, which really needed to happen (the oil was getting low) and so I  didn’t want to cancel that if at all possible (and as it turned out the battery was on its last legs too and as my son will be driving this car it needs to work).

So I needed all the various layers of coverage we have and then some. But I made it to my appointment, my kids all got to school, and my car got fixed (no word yet on the minivan). Unfortunately, something went wrong with the humidity and the plunging temperatures last night and now the wall paper has peeled off the wall in the dining room. But I will get to that problem when I am up and mobile again. Here’s hoping that is soon!

That said, even if nothing is certain, all of life is about the odds. Most likely, most people reading this will be around a year from now. Even if things aren’t 100 percent certain, we have to make decisions given the most likely reality.

This is why I get frustrated when the idea that “the future is unknowable” is then presented as an argument about the futility of attempting to plan the future, with the idea that planning the future is somehow incompatible with enjoying the present. These statements can both be true:

• The future is unknowable
• Many desires about the future are unlikely to happen randomly, so making them happen requires making assumptions that at least the near future will happen, and that its contours will be broadly similar to the present.

I was thinking of this recently because I encountered another one of those masquerading-as-a-deep-thought statements that “all we have is this moment”…right as I started getting all the messages from various local organizations about signing up for summer camp.

Now, I am well aware that the future doesn’t always go as we expect. I signed a lot of kids up for a lot of camps in early 2020, and we all saw how that went.

On the other hand, a lot of the really cool camps sell out fast. If my five kids want to get their first choices of summer fun — choices that won’t conflict with our vacation schedule, and that keep them busy during the day so I can focus — someone needs to be on it. In our family, that someone is me.

I suspect that in a lot of families, that someone is Mom. Which leads me to my second frustration with the “the future is unknowable! We should just enjoy this moment!” argument. There is such a thing as “planning privilege,” as my illustrious co-host puts it. You can perhaps sound deeply philosophical, claiming that the future is unknowable, if you know that, come what will, you will not be the party in your family responsible for taking care of the kids all summer if the ball gets dropped on camp sign-ups. Maybe the future is unknowable, but you’re still assuming that in the future someone else is running your personal life.

So, yes, the future is unknowable in that there could be another pandemic. My community could experience some disaster that primarily targets summer camps. Anything could happen to my family (including the lesser disaster of my kids changing their minds about their interests by summer). Civilization could fall apart. All of these things could potentially unfold. As one of my kids’ books puts it “That’s a possibility!”

But the book also distinguishes between things that are possible (drawing the one green gum ball out of a gum ball machine with two hundred red gum balls) and things that are likely. The most likely course of events is that the near future will be broadly similar to the present. There will be camps, and my kids will want to go. It’s wise to make back up plans (one reason we have a full time nanny even with all the kids in school). But it’s also wise to make plans for the future based on the most likely outcome. Which is why you’ll find me making my camp spreadsheet* over the next few weeks…

*Yes, it’s a spreadsheet! I put the kids’ names along the top, and then the weeks of summer down the left hand side. It helps me see, visually, who’s going where when and whose summer has the right mix of stuff and who needs more going on.

I’ve been thinking of this lately in the context of resilient systems. In my household, things often don’t go exactly as planned, but I feel like lately we’ve been able to roll with a fair number of things without total chaos. I’ve been analyzing what sort of resiliency is in place (so I don’t accidentally, like, lose it or something).

For instance, our house wifi was out for a week (actually 170 hours, not 168, but who’s counting…). Verizon customer service rep #1 told us it was a widespread outage, and we got updates on when it would be fixed — that then kept changing. Finally, Verizon customer service rep #2 said this was wrong, and it was just us. A tech came out on Friday and determined that the cable had been cut…by the lawn guys who’d been aerating around that time. While this is all rather maddening, the upside is we now have a temp line until a permanent one gets put in.

How did our systems respond to this? We could use cell data on our phones, so immediate email/texting was fine. My husband wound up going into his office more frequently. I figured out various “other” offices — Starbucks, the library, a friend’s house. I also got in the habit of asking the older kids each day if they had anything they needed to submit. The goal was for them not to remember this at 9 p.m. when there are fewer options (though someone later pointed out that we could have gone and sat on the library steps — they probably don’t turn the Wifi off overnight).

We are trading in our old van and getting a new van this week. Very exciting! Unfortunately, the old van just got a flat tire. So we are down a vehicle until we figure out how the dealer wants us to deal with this. But there’s resiliency in the system — we have three vehicles kind of for this reason. So I rewrote the schedule for Monday to get a ride to/from somewhere I needed to go (our nanny will take my car to drive kids around). I also asked someone I was meeting for lunch on Tuesday to come to a restaurant I can walk to.

Another schedule change — though a more positive one: My 14-year-old sent me an email on Wednesday that he was going to be running sound for the school play. This involved staying after school Thursday, Friday, Monday and Wednesday, and then being at performances Thursday-Saturday of the next weekend. The four after school practices are fine — he can always take the activity bus, which is just a major plus for schedule resiliency with the middle and high school students. It is built in back up. Sometimes we drive but we don’t have to. Going to/from the shows will involve some more logistics but this is one reason we have built in later hours for our nanny on Thursday — since I’m almost always at choir from 7-9, we have another driver in case my husband isn’t around or we have multiple things going on (which will be the case this week…)

A more sudden instance of things going awry: This morning, my husband left with the 16-year-old at 7:05 to drive him to the high school, then they called at 7:10 or so to report they were coming back. A car was on fire at the bottom of our street (the driver was out, and unhurt, and was already on the phone with the fire department —  who got there very quickly). As there is no other way out of this no-outlet street, they turned around and came back. We waited 20 minutes or so, and then my husband left with the three older kids (we weren’t sure what the bus situations would be) – the fire was out and they could go around and so he brought all of them to school and came back here for an 8 a.m. call instead of going into his office (good that wifi is back). Only the 16-year-old was late (I filled out the tardy form online).

Anyway — we have experienced limited chaos for a few reasons. One is flexible schedules — my husband and I can both work from home when we need to and we don’t have set hours. On transportation, there is the back-up of a third car and the activity bus. There is also the back-up in general of a third person — having more hours of childcare than we might strictly need. On some level all this is just “resources,” which are totally not universal, though it’s taken me time to figure out how to *use* resources to make life smoother. That part is not automatic at all. There are community resources (the library, Starbucks). I’m also realizing that having older kids helps limit chaos as well — we can leave the younger two with the older three. The older three can stay home alone and let themselves into the house if need be. This makes the schedule in general a lot more flexible.

Though my husband just sent me a text that he hadn’t signed the 8-year-old up for the next season of swim and there may not be any practice times available…so we shall see how this all shakes out…

Photo: Fall scene, but not from this fall

We had a good time! It was fun to plan, of course, but also fun to just hang out with a great group of people. I even crossed an item off my “want to do” list — yoga on the beach! We did a 7-8 a.m. session during sunrise on Friday morning.

Now I need to organize some ideas and re-adjust to life at home. I got off the plane and I was like…oh…it’s cold now. But hey, I think I have at least two more Florida trips planned before spring…

When people say that life is a circus, they sometimes mean it’s chaotic. But if you’ve watched a circus, you know that’s not accurate. A three-ring circus is incredibly well orchestrated. No one gets shot out of a cannon at the wrong time. Everyone goes where they are supposed to go in proper sequence. There are generally even contingency plans for if something goes wrong — the clown can do another trick to hold the audience’s attention while something gets fixed in another ring.

I like to think that my Friday planning allows me to be the ringmaster of the circus of my life. Complexity isn’t the enemy. Chaos is. Things can be complex without being chaotic — and that is always the goal.

I will confess that sometimes my Friday planning becomes more like Thursday planning. Sometimes I like to get a jump start on things! At some point on Thursday I open the planner page for the next week. I have a Whitney English planner that has a spread for each week. The right page is just lines, and the left page has each day of the week. I put my priorities/main tasks for the upcoming week on the right side of the page. This page is bifurcated down the middle, so I can put my professional goals on the left half of this right-side page, and my personal goals on the right half of this right-side page.

I spend a little time thinking through what these will be. For both professional and personal priorities, sometimes things are already on my calendar (I keep a separate At-a-Glance weekly pocket calendar where I put time specific things). Some things are repeats (each week I do four or so blog posts, I write a weekly newsletter, and I create five new episodes of Before Breakfast). Some are steps toward bigger goals (working on a book proposal). Some things are preparing for something bigger a week or two ahead (say, practicing for a speech I’m giving the next week).

There isn’t a ton of space on this page — I mean, it’s like 6×9 more or less — and that’s fine. I’m trying to be selective in what I assign myself for each week, because I almost always end the week with everything crossed off. Like if I suspect I won’t do it, I will probably not put it on the list for the week. The goal is to make this weekly priority list a contract with myself. 

(Over the course of the week, I migrate tasks over to the daily spots on the left page as I assign them to myself for each day).

Anyway, I start this process on Thursday because I like to be able to mull it over in the back of my mind. So then I take some time on Friday to confirm what I’ve put on the page and think about if there’s anything else that needs to be added, or if I should edit the list before the week starts (and consciously move something to a later week).

Because the planner week goes Monday-Sunday, this means I am thinking about the following weekend on Thursday/Friday. This tends to be a loose plan (because we’re talking about a weekend that’s 9 days away!), but it’s good to know what’s coming up, and where available space might be, if I’d like to dream up adventures.

Then, on Thursday, I send an email to my husband and often to my older children with the weekend plan for the immediate weekend (the one starting the next day). This is a tightened up version of what I planned the previous week. If there are open spots we might email back and forth about any additional ideas. The kids are supposed to let me know if they are making plans with friends (and I tend to leave enough open space that if a kid decides to do something last minute this can work – and they can sometimes get rides with friends too).

Then, on Friday I spend some time creating the family schedule for the next week. This takes more time than creating my own work schedule, as more things are time-specific. I create a document that says, Monday to Friday, what activities (or any school changes) people have, and who needs to drive who where and when. At this point, week to week, most activities are set BUT there may be one-off changes, like me seeing last week that the technology club parent + student meeting was at the same time as the alto sax lesson. This meant I could text the teacher on Friday to move the lesson scheduled for Wednesday — it’s much better if you need to move or cancel something to do it multiple days ahead of time. The other issue is with parent travel – my husband is supposed to tell me ahead of time if he is absent for times when he would normally be driving, so I can reconfigure the schedule. If I am gone, or if someone has a doctor’s appointment, or if there is a school half day, then obviously that has to be taken into account as well.

Anyway, I create this Monday-Friday document and send it to my husband and nanny. I’ve lately taken to printing it as well so it can sit on the kitchen counter and older children (or my mother-in-law, who’s been visiting) can review it.

I generally like planning my own time. I don’t mind planning weekends. I’m a little less excited about planning the family activity schedule, but I’ve usually got it down to a 30-minute process, and that 30 minutes is what makes this place feel (usually) more like a well-run circus vs. something chaotic. So I generally think it’s worth doing.

What’s your planning looking like these days?

Photo: Blank spread in the Whitney English planner. Note — I use a separate calendar, so I don’t put anything in my planner until the week before. Sadly, this week is not as completely open as it looks on this page…