How to have a perfect week.

The Next Big Idea Daily newsletter?(SUBSCRIBE) ?is written by me,?Michael Kovnat , and gathers insights from today’s leading non-fiction authors. It’s a companion to our?Next Big Idea Daily ?podcast, available on?Apple ?or?Spotify .

Let's look back on the last week. Did you do something nice for yourself? (Me, I had a guitar lesson.) Did you do something important for your relationships? (I drove my family to the airport and attended a friend's event.) Did you do something good for your career? (I conducted a couple of podcast interviews and wrote a newsletter. You're welcome.)

So, like me, you probably took care of the basics. But I bet there was still a lot of empty space on your calendar. Even us busy people have some free time, often more than we think. It's just that we don't organize it, generally speaking -- it's just our "spare" time, after all. But cumulatively, those unstructured minutes and hours likely account for the bulk of your week, and depending on how you feel about your 9-to-5, they might just be the most precious and meaningful times you have.

My guest this week was Laura Vanderkam , author of Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters , and a writer who's dedicated herself to figuring out how we can get more life into our lives, how we can better organize our time -- not just to get more done -- but to build lives of purpose, meaning, and joy.

My favorite of her ideas: that we should inject some adventure into every week. I tend to think of adventure as something that I only get to have once in a while -- on a vacation, or maybe over a nice long weekend. But Laura has a system for building adventures, big and small, into every single week.

Hear Laura Vanderkam explain how to inject adventure into every week:

I've been taking Laura's advice for a couple of weeks, and while I haven't climbed the Matterhorn yet, I did try bánh cam at a Vietnamese pastry shop I'd never been to before, and I performed at an open mic.

While regularly-scheduled adventures might be Laura's funnest life hack, she's got plenty of other ideas on why you should have a bedtime , why you should embrace "effortful fun," and why doing a little planning on Friday afternoons can set you up, week after week, for a life that's more productive, more memorable, and more fulfilling.

So, whatever else is on your schedule this week, have a listen to Laura's big ideas , and see if there's room for a little adventure on your calendar.

Next week

I'll be talking to ?Britt Frank, LSCSW, SEP about her new book, The Science of Stuck: Breaking Through Inertia to Find Your Path Forward .

P.S.

• Want to listen to all of our episodes ad-free? Download?The Next Big Idea app !
• Enjoying our newsletter? Share?this link ?with a friend!
• Are there authors you'd love to hear interviewed on the show? Shoot us an email at [email protected]