[Evidence of today’s creating something. Note: our 16-year old son made the helicopter. I couldn’t be more pleased that he’ll still play Legos with his younger brother]

I love and loathe schedules. I dream of being super effective with every moment of every day, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t stick to a schedule.

Especially during summer.

But I don’t want to whittle away the summer doing a bunch of nothing and watching my kids do likewise. So today over lunch (tacos) we built our anti-schedule.

First, the personal/daily anti-schedule (we all use the same one):

Clean something
Read something
Create something
Exercise something

Here’s how it works. Sometime during the day each of us have to complete each of the above tasks. We’re not setting a time of day, or duration requirement, with the exception of cleaning something. We figure if we do it all together we’ll get more done and have more fun.

Creating something will likely include: Legos, drawing, photography, journal entries, sandcastles, desserts, itineraries, blog posts, cards, notes, videos, comic strips, forts, games.

Exercising will likely include: dancing, surfing, walking, biking, jogging, hiking, skateboarding, swimming, kayaking.

I’m hoping once the above tasks get started, we’ll get lost in the task and follow its rhythm.

Then we also created a weekly/family anti-schedule:

Go somewhere
Eat somewhere
Visit someone

I’m sure the going somewhere will often coincide with the eating somewhere as we’re out and about exploring our environs. One thing we love to do, but haven’t for a long time, is letterboxing, so I imagine we’ll work up an appetite as we hunt.

I want each of us to keep track of what we do each day in some sort of a log, so we can look back on how much fun our summer was.

I hope our anti-schedule’s simplicity will encourage its usage and add inspiration to our summer.