Aug 28, 2021

Blueprint for a perfect day

Jumping off of yesterday’s post about daily habits that benefit everyone (reading, writing, reflection, and exercise) I’d like to imagine what a perfect day might look like that incorporates those habits.

So let’s imagine that you are lucky enough to be making a living doing something creative. You are your own boss. You don’t have a 9-to-5 job doing something that isn’t meaningful to you. You create and sell your own work. Here’s what your perfect day might look like:

You wake up, grab a cup of coffee, and get right into deep work on your most important project. You’re only going to spend roughly 4 hours working on it. I’m too lazy to look up where I heard this but you only have about 3-5 hours of truly good work in you on any given day before you start reaching a point of diminishing returns. The figure sounds reasonable to me so let’s go with it.

After a quick brunch, your afternoon consists of the habits discussed yesterday with an hour dedicated to each one. 

First, you might spend an hour of reflection on a long walk.

Next, you write. It doesn’t matter what you write about and it doesn’t matter that you don’t have an audience. I recommend publishing whatever you write anyways as if someone is going to read it because it will force you to get better at communicating your thoughts.

Then, you read. Read whatever you’re drawn to. I’m personally a fan of non-fiction but reading anything can be a great source of ideas.

Finally, you do a workout and sweat it all out. That completes the productive part of your day within 8 hours (plus the time spent eating).

You’ll want to reserve 8 hours for sleep at the end of the day so the remaining 7-8 hours in your perfect day before heading to bed gets allocated to everything else in your life. Most likely that involves eating dinner, running errands, checking email, and spending time with the people you love.