Skip to main content

How to use our time at home

Image
By
Suddenly we're spending a lot more time at home. Sometimes we're unsure what to do with our time.

We didn't choose for this to happen, but we can choose how we deal with it.

Shutdown Schedule

Daily planner for extra time at home
Here's my daily planner template. It's flexible so feel free to move things around and put other things in. The main idea is that it gives you a default activity to be doing at any given time.

Click the image for a larger version to download, and see below for more details.

Key Actions

I've designed this to give us the things we'll miss while being at home all the time.

Purpose

Find a project that you want to work on. Time will pass quicker if you're working towards a goal. There are some suggestions in the planner. You may have some of your own.

Joy

Events and activities have been cancelled, but we can make our own fun. I've included some time for playing (or listening to) music, playing games (I still love Uno) or watching a movie. You might choose doing art or looking back on old photos.

Social interaction

There are two prompts to call someone. Not a text, or an email - though you can do that too - but an actual phone call. The sound of someone's voice and physically having a conversation is good for us at this time.

Exercise

For mental exercise I've included an hour for a podcast or reading a book (here are my book reviews). There's two prompts to do physical exercise. It can be a run, if that's OK where you live, some frisbee in the backyard, a work-out in your garage or even gardening. The idea is to get some healthy movement into the day.

Project ideas

If you are taking up the decluttering and selling unwanted items, here's my guide to selling items online. An average household could make thousands. Having less stuff can also save you even more again. See how decluttering is currently saving us thousands.

If you're now schooling your kids at home, here a some handy resources:

Learning something new

It might be learning a new skill yourself, particularly if future income is looking shaky. Or it might be a good time to look at having less expenses. I recently did an article on how to waste a year's salary (do the opposite of that) and another on how I got a month's free electricity. Even really small savings can really add up over time.

All the best

Hope this helps you make the most of your time and to stay healthy. For email updates, you can subscribe here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 Reasons why we hoard - and they're wrong

By
"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa...
Post a Comment
Read more

20 unplugged ideas

By
May 1-7 is Screen-Free Week . It's about spending time away from the screen and more time with each other - or doing things we love. It's a great chance to break the work-tired-watchTV-ads-shop-work cycle. This list of twenty alternative ideas is great for screen-free week. It's also a great reminder of things we could enjoy if we're shopping and spending less - and maybe working less and enjoying life more.
Post a Comment
Read more

Will robots take your job?

By
The future could be very different. It's one reason I started this blog. What will technology mean for jobs? For incomes? For society? So I was excited to find Will Robots Take Your Job? at my local library. What does the book say? There's always been technological change and we've always found jobs. As the more laborious jobs were taken by machines, we took on higher skilled jobs, moving further up the "skill ladder". The main question is whether this time is different. Will the "skill ladder" continue to have higher rungs for humans to move on to? Will these rungs appear as quickly as the current rungs disappear? Either way we're headed for significant disruption. Either large-scale re-training of our workforce or massive unemployment. The author despairs that our leaders seem not to talk about this - and worse still, not have a plan for it. Farmers or horses? In 1870 about 75% of Americans worked in agriculture and used 25 million hors...
Post a Comment
Read more