100 Days of Summer

Zero in on your summer of 2023 priorities

For those of you who set a writing goal for this week by commenting on Monday’s writing accountability post, this sentence is a gentle reminder to carve out a little writing time during the long weekend.¹

For me, setting a writing goal for this week inspired me to take two other goal-ish actions:

1. I bought a new 2023 planner² with a design that’s tailor-made to plug the holes in the swiss cheese of my executive function,³ and

2. I did some summer planning math⁴ and realized that because Labor Day⁵ falls on September 4th this year, if I wanted to playfully set some 100-days-of-summer goals, my summer had to start on Sunday, May 28th.

Which gave me the perfect excuse to spend some time this week setting summer goals!

Maybe it’s because my executive functioning is a bit glitchy and planning is the only way I ever feel like my brain and I are playing on the same team. Maybe it’s because I’m a weird nerd who roams Staples⁶ for fun. Maybe it’s because I’m an INFJ on the Myers'-Briggs scale and we J’s adore structure.

Whatever the reason, I really love me a good planning session!

At first glance, setting time aside to plan for the summer might feel a bit redundant given I’m absolutely clear that—where my writing is concerned at least—my novel is my top priority.

But while my novel is my top writing priority, as a human living in a body on this planet, I have many other non-writing priorities. So many priorities—my health, the people I love, my career(s), my commitment to fostering a sense of wonder in a world that sometimes seems hellbent on giving us reasons to worry and grieve.

Though as I stated above, my brain hasn’t historically juggled multiple priorities well, a fact that might not be a problem if my heart and soul were just fine with letting my other balls drop for so long they lay inert at my feet, but I’m often not OK with dropping balls that are important to me⁷.

So, a few times a year, I set aside a block of time, divide a piece of paper into eight boxes, label those boxes with the categories I’m currently worrying about, then fill those boxes with the unfinished business weighing me down. You can do this all in one setting, but if you have time, keep the list close at hand for a day or two and add to it as other tasks occur to you.

Then take a look at the items in each category and see which ones call to you the loudest, whether it’s because there’s a looming deadline or because something in your soul is screaming: “Hey, you! Look at THAT!”

However you mark the goals that feel the most urgent, sit with them a minute and remind yourself we’re setting goals for 100 days not 365—this is the 100 Days of Summer, after all. I’ll pause here to remind you of John Acuff’s advice about planning—when you set a smart goal, you should either double the amount of time allotted for the project or cut the goal in half. So, given this 100 days of summer is just 100 days—and given you likely already have some summer commitments—might you consider cutting your goal in half?

For example, by the end of this summer, I would dearly love to have not only finished part three, but also have revised parts one and two. But given that I’m smack in the middle of a week where I’ve completely revised my plan for part three and unearthed a research project I need to tackle to successfully write part three, it’s pretty clear that trifecta would be a ludicrously lofty goal.

Better to go with: Finish Part three & tackle the research project.

That goal is more modest, sure, but by giving myself the space to do the research my novel needs, I’m likely saving time in the long run, so the more modest goal it is! I scribbled the new, modest goal onto my list, added the total number of hours I’m planning to spend writing this summer, then repeated the whole process for every other task on my list!

If you’d like to give this exercise a try, it’s super low tech. I literally folded an ordinary piece of copy paper, drew messy lines freehand, filled in my categories, then brain-dumped away:

Arts and Crafts for Busy Folks

The categories you totally up to you—you know which areas of your life you need to focus on better than I do—but here are a few to consider:

Writing—If you’re juggling multiple projects, you might split them over multiple boxes. For example, I used one box for my novel and one for all my other writing.

Work—If you wear a lot of different work hats, you might assign a box to each hat.

People—I gathered all my people-related priorities under one big umbrella, but a parent with young kids might want a box for each child.

Health—Use one box for all your health goals or create separate boxes for physical, mental, and social health.

Fun—Surprising no one, the woman who thinks planning is fun needs a separate category to remember to make time for fun. If you’ve got fun covered, you might use a box for a particular intensive hobby.

Gnats—This is my miscellaneous category to catch all the uncategorizable to-dos buzzing around my brain.

To be clear, those are just suggestions. Your categories are dictated by your needs. Hell, depending on my focus, the categories I use are often slightly different from one quarter to the next.

Here’s an artsy shot of my final list:

My tasks are obscured because I don’t want to bare my soul here, but I’m happy to declare that in addition to finishing this draft, I’m also planning to adopt a fur beast⁸, eat 100 salads, and go see the Van Gogh Cypresses exhibit at The Met in New York.

And for anyone worried I’d abandoned Mood Tools⁹, I have three more essays in that series planned, followed by a fun (I hope) summer series to be named at a later date!

So, yeah.

Set aside few minutes this weekend to give your goals a think, and you never know what might happen: You might even publicly commit yourself to eating 100 salads¹⁰ in 100 days.

Share your top goals this summer so we can cheer on your writing and share in the fun!

1. For HIBOU’s international readers, Monday the 29th is Memorial Day in the United States. Officially it’s a holiday to mourn the loss of those who died in service to this country. Unofficially Memorial Day marks the start of summer in our hearts, a measure particularly necessary in the northern areas of the country where summer is so fleeting it seems criminal to make us wait until June 21st.

2. My best life hack for finding incredible deals on yearly planners is to wait five months into the year to buy it. So cheap it feels like I stole it! The planner is Planner Pad and it has a big weekly spread that allows you to categorize your tasks for the week, prioritize those tasks into specific days, and schedule time to finish those tasks in a calendar. If you’re curious, there’s the link .

3. I’ve got excellent executive function where one project is concerned—focus on an essay for hours, yes, please!—but it tends to fall apart when asked to handle multiple priorities—Truly, pomodoro-ing my way through multiple projects in a day is my idea of hell. I mean, seriously. If the brain takes 23 minutes to settle into a task after being interrupted, then why would anyone want to voluntarily step away from a task after 25 minutes? Why, I ask you!!

4. Fear not! I was mostly counting!

5. For HIBOU’s international readers, Labor Day is a federal holiday that celebrates the gains made by laborers and the American labor movement. This weekend also marks the unoffical end of summer.

6. Staples is a chain office supply store in the United States.

7. As detailed in Panic at the Disco.

8. This is quite the bold statement because my main requirement in adopting a dog is that the dog have kind eyes. This is a problem because 98.9 percent of dogs have kind eyes, so one week I want a giant Golden Retriever or another greyhound, and the next I want a dainty Italian greyhound or Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. This week I asked about a black Shit-zu named Vader who I dearly wanted because a) he was described as a sweetheart and b)if I adopted him I could start a dog blog called Oy Vader! Alas, another adopter has scooped Vader up, though perhaps this is a good thing. The world certainly doesn’t need another dog blog, though I have to think if said blog was called Oy Vader, the world might make an exception.

9. I don’t actually think anyone is worried.

10. If you have a salad recipe you’d like to share, I’m all ears…of corn! (I’ll show myself out.)