Here’s One Small Pleasure for Every Day of the Week

Make Habits, Too, of Rest and Joy

I love my planner. I am one of those. I use the Passion Planner (which was developed by Angelia Trinidad, who turns out to be a really nice person on top of building a business around an object that I would go out of my way to save in a fire), and I tried over a dozen planners before landing on this one.

I learned in a professional development session, that was otherwise bad and featured a lot of memes from “The Office,” that in order to use a planner well, you need to set aside at least a solid hour a week just for planning in your planner. The person leading the seminar called this “going to the mountain.” I don’t remember why. But I liked the massiveness of “mountain,” so I still call it that. “I need two hours to go to the mountain,” I say to no one. I’m here to tell you about two lessons I’ve learned by painstakingly prioritizing trips to the mountain, which are: (1) it’s hard to get things done when you’re using the word “maybe”; and (2) the thing that Dale Cooper said on “Twin Peaks” about how you should “every day, once a day, give yourself a present” is good advice. But it helps to regulate it.

MAYBE.

The word “maybe” is tricky. It SEEMS like it would be a good word. It acts like it’s filled with imagination…