What Does Your Ideal Day Look Like?

What would your ideal day look like? I don’t mean if you are on vacation and had all the time and money in the world to do whatever you want. I’m talking about your ordinary day; your typical Monday through Friday, I’ve got to get stuff done today day.

I don’t know about you, but there are so many things I would love to accomplish in my day and week. However, for many reasons, some of which I have to take full responsibility for and others are beyond my control, I accomplish very few of them.

We all have tasks to get done. We have to get food prepared, we have to try and keep our home reasonably tidy, somebody has to bath the kids. And it’s so easy to let all of these things prevent us from adding value to our lives by including those rituals that are important to us.

In my ideal day, I would love to do a little bit of yoga, every day. I would love to read more. I would love to stay up-to-date on current affairs and politics. My ideal day would hopefully include a short meditation practice. I would like to dedicate a little bit of time playing the piano. I used to be pretty good, back in the day, now I find myself stumbling through music pieces and it’s super frustrating.

I have a one-year-old little girl and I’m also pregnant, and anyone who has a child, or children, knows that it’s very easy for all of one’s personal time to be lovingly given to our little ones. I am a stay home mom, aside from teaching a few yoga classes a week. So what this means, believe it or not, is that I have very little time to devote to myself. In fact the only time I do have is naptime. And this is where the blame shifts to me. I need to learn to get better at using nap times in a more productive and self improving well. I’ve certainly got better. For a long time, as soon as my baby went down to sleep, I would head straight to the couch and binge watch whatever Netflix show was currently tickling my fancy. I’m trying to break that habit.

In my mind, rituals are important. I like the idea of organising my day in such a way that I am able to achieve the things I want to, hopefully without any of it starting to feel like a chore.

Lets not forget that with every choice to include something in one’s day, we are at the same time making a choice on what to sacrifice or exclude. For every yes you make you are also choosing a no. And I think this is a really important point to be aware of: it is one thing to know what you want in your day, but what are you you willing to sacrifice for it?

And so, with all that said, I am trying to design my day. I realise that it may not be possible to fit everything into each day, especially taking into account the fact that normal life tasks still need to get done. However, if I can dedicate moments of my day and my week to specific things that I deem to be important for my own self care and improvement, in time these will become joy-filled rituals. That’s the hope anyway.

• 7am-ish: typical wake up time
• Breakfast: read a couple news articles and/or blogs while baba (Maya) is eating
• 10am-ish: first nap time and a chance to do the following
  • have breakfast myself
  • spend some time on my blog
• 11:30am-ish: wake up time and play time, lunch, hopefully a nice walk
• 3pm-ish: second nap time and a chance to do any/all of the following
  • have lunch
  • short yoga and meditation practice
  • bath/shower
  • prepare dinner
• 4:30pm-ish: wake up time, which includes a walk to the park, play, dinner and bath
• 7pm-ish: bed time for Maya
• Before bed: enjoy dinner, put my feet up and relax

The only thing missing is playing the piano, and I honestly do not see where I can fit this in during the typical day. I guess its going to have to be a “see what happens” kind of thing. Despite this omission, I am pretty confident that I can keep this up.

Of course, I must be reasonable, I mean, life happens, right? Laundry day will present its own spanner, and the days I teach yoga may look a little different to the days I don’t. However, even if I can keep this up 4 days a week, it is still a whole lot better than the previously lazy couch-denting days I have gotten used to.

I’m going to try this out as best I can and report back… stay tuned.

In the meantime, do you have any tips on how to best use free time? I’d love to hear 🙂