So what would it take to create your best summer ever?

I’ve been pondering this question lately. I’ve had many good summers in my life, but there’s no reason they shouldn’t continue to be on an upward trajectory. As I learn more about happiness and how we spend our time, I’ve figured out a few techniques that I think are helpful.

First, it’s important to think. What would make for a great summer? You could try making a list of 100 dreams (or a list of 100 summer dreams in particular) to brainstorm what you’d find pleasurable. Blend the professional and the personal — there’s no reason summer should only be about leisure time pursuits. You could make great professional strides as well. A career breakthrough would certainly make for a best summer ever!

Second, you have to plan. I’m all in favor of spontaneity, but we live in a constantly-connected electronic world. Unlike when John Keats wrote his Ode on Indolence, any spot of empty time will be instantly filled by email, television or other such distractions. You can plan big stuff and then allow for spontaneity within it (deciding to go to the downtown of a nearby city for the day, for instance, but then wandering wherever you want in the neighborhood while you’re there). Having pleasurable stuff on the calendar gives us things to look forward to.

Third, remember the small stuff. Happiness isn’t only about big experiences. It’s also simply about how we’re spending our hours. If you know being outside makes you happy, you should choose to spend more time outside. Think about how to do that. Can you eat lunch outside during the workday? Can you take your conference calls outside? Can you bike to work some days? If getting together with friends makes you happy, think about more regular ways to work it into your life. A book club? An exercise partner? Sunday night potluck dinners?

Finally, be mindful of what is going right. Try keeping a “Best Summer Ever” list in which you record the happy parts of your days. Memories can be fleeting things, but the act of writing something down digs the memory in a little deeper as you experience a part of it again.

What would you include in your best summer ever?

Photo courtesy flickr user Moyan_Brenn

Laura’s note: A version of this column ran in USA Today on Tuesday. Yes, Friday is usually round-up day, but I just got off the red-eye from LAX and this is all I got right now.

Grads, Pursue a Realistic Dream

by Laura Vanderkam

Photo courtesy flickr user turkeymom4bacon

There’s a certain narrative I’ve heard many times about people scaling down careers and such with parenthood because they don’t want to miss milestones. The first step is a big one — think that “Cat’s in the cradle” song about how his son “learned to walk while I was away.” But here’s the thing: I’ve watched two children learn to walk now, and am starting to watch a third. In every case, learning a new skill is a long process. There are a few false starts, something that could be a step, regression, something else that could be a step, and finally, after weeks of almost walking, actual walking. You could miss all of that, but you’d have to be gone for a really long time. And to be sure you see the true first step in all this, you’d have to glue yourself to your kid’s side. You couldn’t even go to the bathroom.

That’s why I think parenthood is less about discrete milestones and more about just being there. A lot. In the long run, the fact that I’ve eaten lunch with my son most days for the past year will probably matter more to our relationship than watching him open presents on one particular day. In 5 years, there have been many bedtime stories, many boo-boos kissed, many scurrying trips to a McDonald’s bathroom, and some moments of absolutely transcendent joy. A birthday might be one such moment. But so are others.

Have you missed any major milestones? How did you feel about that?

But here’s a twist on this practice: could you go email free at work?

That’s the recommendation coming out of a new study from researchers at the University of California at Irvine and the U.S. Army. After observing a group of civilian employees at one of the Army’s sites near Boston, they then had some go without email for 5 days. That’s 5 working days, by the way.

The result? The no-email group reported being better able to do their jobs and stay on task. And the data backed them up. Co-workers who could check email switched screens on their computers 37 times an hour. Those who were on email vacations switched only 18 times an hour. They also felt less stressed, which the researchers found a bit surprising. After all, email is often necessary to our jobs, and not having access to it would feel like working with a hand tied behind your back. But apparently, that hand enjoyed being tied there.

The researchers talked about ways companies could manage email checking, like controlling log in times or batching message delivery. This seems a wee bit extreme, but I sympathize. We often forget that, for most of us, email is not our job. It is a tool to do our jobs, and it has a tendency to get out of control. Inboxes are a bit like slot machines, with rewards (a useful or fun email) coming often enough that we keep hitting refresh in a compulsive manner.

I’m trying to keep my weekday email checking under control by scheduling my days more tightly — putting big projects on my schedule at certain times, rather than just putting them on the day’s to-do list. Knowing I’m supposed to be working on a column from 9:30-10:30 does seem to keep me focused. I also close the browser window with my inbox, and turn off my iPhone. Resisting temptation is tough — but worth it.

Could you go email free during the workday?

Chapter 10 is the last chapter, so I guess this is the last week! Chapter 10 is called “Ode to a Ziploc Bag.” For an explanation of why Ziploc bags are so fraught for me, you can read this guest post at The Clutter Diet blog. Basically, I grew up learning to be frugal, and Ziploc bags are always a few dollars more than generic sandwich baggies that don’t zip. It was incredibly hard to stand there in the store and buy the Ziplocs that first time, even though I prefer them. I use this insight to get into a few questions. First, how to maintain one’s excitement about little pleasures as you start doing better in life (will I always find Ziploc bags so exciting?), and second, what we’re supposed to teach our kids about money. After all, if I learned my anti-Ziploc mentality from shopping with my parents, what are my kids going to pick up from me?

These are fraught questions. I’m still asking them myself. If you have been fortunate enough to have “enough,” how do you teach your children the value of a dollar? Can you pass on your good financial habits without the bad ones? My husband and I are natural savers, which is good, but we’ve made plenty of questionable decisions in our lives out of a desire to “save” money (often in ways that consume time). Sometimes you do need to invest in things that matter: your career, your happiness, etc. 

Anyway, this week’s discussion question is related to that: what financial habits did you pick up from your parents? Which ones do you hope to pass along to your children and which do you hope you don’t pass along?

Links to past weeks:

ATM Book Club Week 1 (intro)

ATM Book Club Week 2 (Chapter 1)

ATM Book Club Week 3 (Chapter 2)

ATM Book Club Week 4 (Chapter 3)

ATM Book Club Week 5 (Chapter 4)

ATM Book Club Week 6 (Chapter 5)

ATM Book Club Week 7 (Chapter 6)

ATM Book Club Week 8 (Chapter 7)

ATM Book Club Week 9 (Chapter

ATM Book Club Week 10 (Chapter 9)

Photo courtesy flickr user Razor512

Anyway, this rash of travel has inspired a few CBS MoneyWatch posts. One of my favorites from this week is “4 secrets to staying happy on the road.” What veteran road warriors know is that business trips can present luxurious opportunities for me-time if you use them right. You can get up early and go run or walk without having to negotiate who’s getting up with the kids (or dealing with a partner’s expectation that you’ll have breakfast with him/her). Yes, you often have evening activities planned (team dinners or drinks with a client) but sometimes you can sneak away and read a book. And then go to bed nice and early. Or even watch TV! When I was in Chicago recently, I turned on the TV between a conference session and dinner, and watched some show on HGTV about first time home buyers. It was the first time I’d watched non-TiVo’d TV since I’d been in the hospital having Ruth (and then it was Steve Jobs around the clock, since he’d passed away that day). I got a great anecdote out of that show. Namely, both young women who were buying their first homes looked at homes that cost far less than the mortgage amounts banks approved them for. It showed my frequent point that overspending on housing leaves you with less cash for other things. One woman said this specifically: she wanted to keep going out with friends, shopping, etc. A cheap mortgage (in relation to her income) let her do that. Very refreshing. I’ve now mentioned that anecdote on a few radio interviews.

I’ll be traveling next week for a project. While I’ll have my computer with me and have several assignments that need to get done, one of the things I’m looking forward to is having time to think. Hopefully I’ll come back with some deep thoughts about my career and what I want to be when I grow up. (I talk a little bit about finding one’s passion in another post from this week: “How do you find your career passion?“) What’s my next big project? I don’t know, but I hope to have some ideas!

In other news:

* Oil and Garlic is in the midst of reading All the Money in the World, and (mostly) enjoying it.

* My friend Naomi Schaefer Riley seems to have gotten fired from the Chronicle of Higher Education over a blog post critical of a few dissertations in the field of African American studies. She writes her side of the story in this post for the Wall Street Journal.

* Cali Williams Yost writes a moving tribute to her mother for Mother’s Day, called “I Dare to Dream, Because My Mother Couldn’t.” The most striking image to me is of young Cali bringing her mother peanut butter sandwiches as her mother typed academic papers late at night. She was going back to school after finding herself divorced, with three daughters to raise, at age 35, with no work history. She told Cali, “Promise me you’ll never be in this position. Figure out what you want to do professionally, and make sure you like it enough to not hate leaving your children every day.” Excellent advice.

* Time magazine takes on attachment parenting this week, by showing a young mother breastfeeding her 3-year-old on the cover. People are a little shocked, and I’m sure that’s what Time was going for, though I’m all in favor of normalizing public breastfeeding. My baby doesn’t like to eat with a blanket over her head and frankly, neither would I.

I’ve long been fascinated by people who manage to use their mornings well. For all except a few confirmed night owls, mornings are a great time to tackle projects that are important but not urgent — that aren’t immediately externally rewarded. We tend to wake up with a fresh supply of willpower. That discipline will get exhausted over the course of the day as we deal with annoying colleagues, traffic and bickering children, but in the morning, we can tackle the world. So what should we do with that time?

I profile people who do all kinds of things: creative work, spiritual disciplines, family time, exercise, thinking. And as usually happens when I write a lot on a topic, I start thinking about how to put it into practice in my own life as well.

These days, my 7-month-old daughter is waking up with the sun at around 6 o’clock. My nanny shows up at 8 a.m. three days a week, and I usually bring the older children to school at 8:45 on Thursdays and Fridays, finishing the preschool run around 9. There is a lot of time between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Three hours! This is a lot of time to spend mindlessly. And yet, if I don’t think about how I’m spending it, “mindless” is exactly how I’d describe those hours. This morning I tried to think about it a little more. I woke up at 6 a.m. with the baby and fed her. I got dressed and at 6:45 handed her over to my mother-in-law (who is mercifully visiting us again). Then I went for a half hour run. Back home at 7:15, I played with the kids on the floor a little — they’re so cute when they’re all hugging each other! — and helped with breakfasts. We ate in a leisurely fashion, and then I helped the boys get dressed around 8. Then we all went down to the basement to play for another 20 minutes or so before it was time to load the car (I’ll admit I started checking email in the basement — my excuse is that my workday normally starts at 8). I chatted in the car with the boys and then came home and — after a little more baby time — got started blogging. I like to do my creative, focused work early in the day. I’m also brainstorming how to promote the ebook, and mornings are great for thinking.

So at T+4 hours from starting the day, I’ve had quite a bit of relaxed family time, got a run in, and written a blog post. I think that’s pretty good. I’m trying to be more disciplined about making that happen on other days too, given various other constraints (I don’t always have another adult in the house).

What do you do with your mornings? What would you like to do with your mornings?

Such generous benefits are designed to give moms and babies time to bond, but according to a new magazine survey (highlighted in the Daily Mail), they’re having a side effect: giving burnt-out women an escape route. Of 2000 British women surveyed, half said they were considering having a baby to get a year off of work.

This “shocking statistic,” as the Daily Mail puts it, should be taken in context. After all, British media seem contractually bound to overplay all stories. The Daily Mail found two women who claimed their jobs were stressful, and that may have played a part in their decision to start their families. One decided not to return to work, and one is weighing whether to return or not. So really, all we’ve learned is that some women decide to stay home with their kids.

But I was fascinated to read these new moms’ comments and how the Daily Mail spun them in light of the larger conversation, this Mother’s Day, over what constitutes work, and also how naive some people are about what living with small children entails. I think this stems, in part, from how we romanticize motherhood in a way that isn’t healthy for anyone.

For instance, take this quote from Sarah, who started a family in part because she wanted a break from her teaching job:

“Some days the children would be running round the classroom, or even up and down the corridors, refusing to listen to the lesson I’d carefully planned and I felt I had no back-up to deal with it… On one occasion, I ran into the management office in tears, saying “I can’t be in that classroom any more” because it had got so bad….From the time I arrived at school at 8am, it was non-stop teaching, prepping and supervising, with a 15-minute window to grab lunch….When the official school day ended at 3pm, inevitably there’d be meetings or children asking me for help with their course work, and I could never say no.”

As a mother of three children under the age of 5, I read this comment and thought “Oh, Sarah, talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.” You think running around the classroom is bad? My 4-year-old ran away from me at Disney World. My children frequently refuse to follow along with activities I’ve carefully planned and you know what will also make you cry? Being up from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. with a baby who wants to play, not go back to sleep. But there’s no management office to run to in that case. As for that sentence noting that “from the time I arrived at school at 8 a.m, it was non-stop teaching, prepping and supervising,” let’s just note that being home with small children is much the same, except the day starts before 8 a.m. And it probably goes past 3 p.m., too, with “children asking me for help.” You’ll have a harder time saying no to your own kids than your school charges.

Or then there’s this Daily Mail quote from Yuliana, who is on maternity leave from her job at Southbank University:

“I was working up to ten hours a day, and while it was rewarding, it was also exhausting and isolating.”

You know what is also exhausting and isolating? Being home with small children. But again, the shifts are longer than 10 hours. As Professor Christine Edwards of Kingston University Business School told the Daily Mail, “Taking maternity leave as a short-term way out of a stressed working environment is daft… What women should do is try to negotiate better working conditions with their line managers.”

I agree. We have a tendency to romanticize motherhood in our society as being somehow magical and maximally fulfilling and fun. While it can be all three at transcendent moments, it’s also a lot of work. Just as paid jobs can be amazing at times and are also difficult and stressful at other times. Life is hard work. “Life is difficult,” as M. Scott Peck started his bestselling self-help book The Road Less Traveled. Swapping one kind of work for another doesn’t change that. The idea that we shouldn’t have to work hard is part of the princess mindset that I complain about a lot. While I might enjoy the irony that the socially acceptable route out of work stress offered to modern women (staying home with small kids) is every bit as stressful as any job that doesn’t involve jumping out of airplanes and into terrorist bunkers, the fact that Sarah and Yuliana both admit in the article that they were naive doesn’t change that their mindset is probably widespread. 

So here’s my take: If you want to take time off to raise children, do that with your eyes open to the reality that you won’t love every minute. Just as no one loves every minute of any other job. Children are their own little people, not some sort of ticket out of the grind. If you approach all your projects with that mindset — that nothing is an escape from anything else — you’ll make wiser decisions in general.

Chapter 9 is called “Another Way to Invest.” I knew that any book on money had to talk about “investing” in some way, shape or form, but I find most investment literature phenomenally boring. Yes, I’m the proud owner of a wide variety of index funds, and I’ve followed the Dow since I was a sixth grader reading the newspaper in a neighbor’s driveway in the morning while waiting for the school bus to come pick me up (I should have bought then, in 1990, instead of just reading!). But all that talk on cable finance shows about “stocks fell slightly in the morning due to investor fears of a euro area slowdown, but rose again in heavy trading in the afternoon due to minutes released from the Fed’s last meeting…?” It’s just noise.

So instead I looked at a different angle: how people could invest with the goal of creating a community they’d want to live in. I picture this as an economically vibrant community, with lots of firms offering fascinating things, and ideally customers getting to know proprietors and turning shopping into something less soulless that way. Thanks to the new crowdfunding bill that passed recently in the US, small investors are actually going to be able to invest in small businesses without being the founder’s brother (previous SEC rules required a high net worth for investing in pre IPO start-ups). This bill hadn’t been passed when I wrote the book, but I think it’s great. You can lose $10,000 (basically the max investment limit) in all kinds of ways that don’t do anyone any good. Investing in a small business just might help that business get going.

But even if you’re not interested in getting in on the equity side of a business, done right, spending one’s money can be an investment in creating a thriving community. Money is power, and how you spend it says a lot about your values. If you’re a free agent who wants a chic coffee shop in which to meet clients, you better be a good customer of anything that comes close in your town. You’re buying your coffee there daily, referring other people there, giving the owner advice in your expertise area if she wants it, etc. It’s nice to have places where everybody knows your name. If you think a family that recently immigrated to the US from Peru and opened a Latin fusion restaurant in your town is doing a great job, you should eat there more frequently then, say, McDonalds.

So this week’s question: how do you show your values through your shopping? Do you frequent certain establishments — and not frequent others — because of what you believe? Has this ever backfired on you? I tried to get pizza delivered from a locally-owned pizzeria recently and had a horrible experience. It reminded me that if all I really want is a mediocre hot pizza in 20 minutes, I should keep some frozen ones in my freezer. On the other hand, I’ve been trying to go to as many of Philadelphia’s great, unique restaurants as possible (Mica! Sbraga!) I’m thrilled to learn I have a cute little coffee shop within walking distance too. Guess where everyone now has to meet me for coffee…

Previous posts:

ATM Book Club Week 1 (intro)

ATM Book Club Week 2 (Chapter 1)

ATM Book Club Week 3 (Chapter 2)

ATM Book Club Week 4 (Chapter 3)

ATM Book Club Week 5 (Chapter 4)

ATM Book Club Week 6 (Chapter 5)

ATM Book Club Week 7 (Chapter 6)

ATM Book Club Week 8 (Chapter 7)

ATM Book Club Week 9 (Chapter