A Perfect Day, Part II

Do you have days in your past that you look to more fondly than others? Have you had super-productive days where you are constantly, yet effortlessly, productive? Where your To Do list, seemingly impossible in the morning, turns into merely a starting point by the afternoon? Where you collapse into bed, having difficulty remembering all the tasks accomplished, project moved forward, call made, and people served?

Those types of days are forever etched in my psyche. I recall these “Perfect Days” with such strong nostalgia and longing. (Although such days are not technically Perfect, after having lived 14,000 days I can say they are close enough jazz. For our purposes, Perfect means “among the best of your life.”)

The most poignant memory of such Perfect Days, for me, is the sheer quantity of things done. It was like every little task hanging over my head vanished. Things were clean, read, paid, used, organized, and simply done. The List got smaller, and those items that didn’t get crossed off, got closer to it.

One of the hardest things for me to do has been to divorce the magic of youth, gone forever, and the Perfect Day Feeling. What if my memory confuses the two? What if I’m confusing the two, and in fact one can never feel the PDF again? I truly don’t have an answer to that. Anyway…

If you could construct a Perfect Day, what would it look like? What time would you wake up? Would you make a To Do list in the morning, or at all? What would you do first? What would be done by breakfast? By lunch? Would your work finish at any specific time, or would you work ‘til you drop? Would it be a weekend, or weekday? Would you assume that you’d work that day?

Most people have a lot of trouble planning a Perfect Day. My suggestion is to start with the Perfect Hour. It's much harder than you think.

But it's worth it.