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Stop Wasting Time Planning Your “Perfect Day.”

It won’t ever happen. Here’s why, and what to do instead.

I remember when I had my perfect day.

It happened years after I’d first tried the popular journal prompt. Usually it’s something like this: “Describe your perfect day. Don’t let reality get in your way, just describe what you imagine if you had everything you wanted.”

I’d seen the prompt before, and ignored it because it felt too painful to write about things that I thought I’d never have — travel, physical health, a stable relationship, money in the bank, time to spend with my kids and my art and my writing and my partner(s) (polyamory wasn’t as mainstream twenty years ago, so that seemed especially unrealistic).

But that one day, sitting on my porch in a house that had the rent paid up in full, several clients in the docket readme to do work I cared about, kids at school, wife at work, and a happy good morning text from my girlfriend in Chicago — it seemed safe enough to try.

So I let my imagination wander. I wrote about having time to exercise, about having uninterrupted time to write my own work, about having lunch with clients and spending time with my kids and grandkid, about having an assistant to take care of the invoicing and the (at that point, imaginary)…