Every Sunday we sit down at the computer and schedule our week. We started this several years ago in the interests of getting some major household projects done and our system has evolved quite a bit over time. But one trend of late has been particularly pleasing: leaving more unplanned time.

For quite a while we would get up on Saturday or Sunday and have a tightly booked list of tasks to complete. Usually they had to be wrapped up by 6 p.m. so we could get ready for a date or other evening fun. If we slept late or lounged on the couch for a while over coffee, our tasks would slide later and later. Towards 6pm we were always rushed and behind on our list and weekends didn’t feel like weekends. It seemed like we were spending all of our time together doing miscellaneous support tasks and the rest of the time we were just working.

The first step we took was cutting off weekend scheduled tasks at 4 p.m., which became our “pencils down” time. With that arbitrary deadline, we started scheduling less stuff on the weekends because there was less time to do it in. We might run late and finish up at 4:30 or so, but that still wasn’t bad. It meant we now had a little window of goof-off time before getting ready for a night out (or in!).

Even so, our weekends still felt too demanding. Especially when we started having better weather and we’d look out of our third-floor windows, misty-eyed, at the people happily wandering the neighborhood while we researched life insurance or finally got the curtains installed in the living room, or whatever.

So now we put even less stuff on the weekends. This weekend Jenny has some freelance editing to do and we’re going to make some more progress on finishing our honeymoon album (!), plus a couple of our regular household chores, but that’s it. This morning when we sat on the couch and drank coffee we realized we could just spend an hour hanging out. Jenny played a new videogame while John read the Economist, and then Jenny read the Economist while John played some other new videogames, and then we had breakfast.

It isn’t an easy choice to make. We’ve never unpacked the many boxes in our study, for example, and it’s a disaster area of crap that we both dislike spending time in. The bedroom is in a similar state. We have a lot of lingering tasks that are important and take time, whether it’s implementing our computer backup solution, getting our wedding negatives scanned, sorting out renter’s insurance, and on and on. These things need to get done and we make no progress on them if we don’t make time for them. But we also need time to just be together and happy and in love, and that means making trade-offs between tasks and free time.

Last night we’d planned to have dinner with a friend, but when he had to bail out we suddenly had an evening free. So we had a quick meal at Johnny Rockets and saw the film Zodiac, which was outstanding. We actually like it when plans get canceled at the last minute because it’s like finding some money in your pocket that you didn’t know was there — except instead of money what you find is time. We loved finding that wadded up little ball of time and we carefully smoothed it out, crisped it up, and spent it on a great evening.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.