What do you do on a Saturday morning? Now try doing (a bit of) that every day.
I used to block off Saturdays entirely for my creative self. I would wake up, make myself a coffee, sit at my desk or go to a café and write. In the thick of the hardest academic year of my life plus a full-time job which demanded 30+ hours of my time each week, I felt like I could only make my way through “doing life as I had to” 6 days a week. I just couldn’t muster that 7th day. I always kept Saturdays to myself, especially Saturday mornings.
In one of my favourite books, the Happiness Equation, Neil Pasricha says:
“What do you do on a Saturday morning? Your authentic self should move towards that.”
Neil’s philosophy is that Saturday mornings are a time where your true self gets to breathe and lean into doing the thing(s) you genuinely love. These are things which make you feel excited, creative, present, in flow. These are the activities we should try to incorporate into our daily lives more if we want to live a truly happy and fulfilled life.
Neil prescribes the Saturday Morning Test to figure out what lights you up and how to do more of it every day. I found the following few questions helpful to put the test into action. I recommend writing answers to the following questions for this to be truly effective.
Visualize your ideal Saturday morning
What do you do on an ideal Saturday morning? Do you wake up and go to yoga, a climbing gym, go outside, read, write, volunteer with an animal shelter, visit your neices and nephews, etc.?
What is it about that activity that makes you light up? Think carefully about how you feel when you’re actually doing the thing that you love. What are the aspects of it which make it feel exciting and enriching?
How can you do more of that every day? How can you incorpororate the activity you do on Saturdays or the feeling it gives you into more of what you do throughout the week? Could it be a side project? a blog? a yoga/climbing instructor’s course? a nature walk outside after work?
It is not extremely realistic for every morning could be exactly like your ideal Saturday morning. However, there are plenty of ways to sprinkle in some of your Saturday morning joy into the rest of the week. This provides more opportunity for your authentic self to play a more significant role in your everyday life.
There was a period of time in the summer where I would wake up every day, go to a cafe and write. My Saturday morning became my every morning. I knew that routine wasn’t sustainable for me to continue doing indefinitely, but I was amazed at how incredible it felt to do something every single day which felt authentic and true to myself. I originally thought this would be impossible to keep doing once I got back to school and had to carry on with my academics and other responsibilities — but then I found ways to use “found time” (time where we’re not doing anything and don’t need to be anywhere) to fit in mini-Saturday morning sprints throughout the week. It’s extremely freeing to take control of your day, and realize that you don’t need to be chained to the mundane schedule or lifestyle society prescribes, especially once you start working.
There’s really only two things we don’t have control of: other people and death. Everything else is in our control, and yet we give so much of that control up without realizing it. The Saturday Morning Test is an easy way to harness the control over our days that we do have, and channel it into doing something that makes us feel good.
Try the Saturday Morning Test, and do something this week you would usually only save for the weekend — see what happens. It’s amazing the rewards we can reap by making small changes to our days over time.