Friday content + could it possibly rain on Sunday again?

Happy Friday! In making the weekend schedule, I looked at the weather forecast, and currently there is a 95 percent chance of rain on Sunday. The past three weeks of Sunday baseball games have been rained out and now it looks like this one could be too. It seems improbable, and yet…There might be a Tuesday make-up game scheduled next week but we shall see.

In the meantime, a few links for the week. First, over at Before Breakfast, I interviewed Ben Meer, author of the new book, How to Be Good at Life. He has lots of ideas for thinking about systems, and I love his idea of adding in one new system to make life smoother/easier as part of your weekly planning process. What will it be this week?

In the shorter episodes, among other things, I talked about how “You can talk about movies.” When you or a friend are going through something hard, there are times when you want to open up and share your deepest feelings and sometimes you just…don’t. So know that it’s OK, when you don’t want to go deep, to talk about movies or books or TV or the weather. Spending time with people you love is still comforting, even if the conversation is on the shallow side.

Over at Vanderhacks, my Substack newsletter, I wrote that you should “Say why you want to talk.” You can create a lot of needless anxiety by texting or emailing someone “call me — I have something to tell you.” Yikes! So it if isn’t terrible, tell the person that it isn’t. And even if it is, you might want to give some specifics so the person knows the direction in which to direct those worries.

I also suggested you “Take a group photo” to remember events. Even if it’s kind of a buzz kill in the moment you’ll likely be happy to have an artifact of the gathering. And I talked about how you should “Choose a ‘choir night’ dinner.” When you have a dinner that you can cook and eat quickly, you don’t have to choose between having family dinner and taking one night for you (to go play in your pickleball league, volunteer, etc.). You get to do both!

Behind the paywall I wrote about “7 little ways to make your schedule more resilient.”

If you haven’t already, please pick up a copy of Big Time! My newest book is all about how to achieve a sense of time abundance, even in the midst of a busy life. Thanks for supporting me and my work.