Exceptional days, exceptional weeks

It’s said life is a string of ordinary days, with intermittent exceptional ones. That’s not how I felt the past weeks!

I often I think: “I didn’t accomplish what I wanted, but that’s because today is not a normal day”. I’ve realized it’s time to shift my mindset: there are no normal days.

Every day has something making it different from the day before. Every week has something making it different from the week before. No week has consistent, regular, predictable days.

I’m dubbing it “the fallacy of the normal week”.

Last week was not a normal week #

Let’s look at last week, what happened?

• Monday – I got back to work, the kids had a day off. I had two meetings while they were playing in the background
• Tuesday – first day of school madness. Daughters’ headset broke and I fixed it with some soldering. Neighbor’s shed-roof blew off with the wind and I returned it. Cat threw up badly.
• Wednesday – the dishwasher had an error code. I fixed it with some intens cleaning with special materials (that I had to go out and buy). Ordered groceries. Piano lessons.
• Thursday – 20:30 meeting for work, my son got fever, we slept bad
• Friday – son stayed at home with me because of being sick: could barely work. Had to fix Docker-setup because someone somewhere made a code-signing error. Bad sleep again because of sick son
• Saturday – son is better, but whole family very tired from sickness (except son, he’s full of energy, thank god). Special event at my daughters’ scouting, where I joined
• Sunday – swimming lesson of my son took considerably longer as my daughter also wanted to join and we had lunch there. After that a birthday party

Throughout the week I additionally had the mental load of preparing for my sons’ birthday, planning a holiday to Turkey, and a poster I’m working on.

Is that a normal week? It doesn’t feel like it. Every day was different from “normal”.

But every week is different #

The whole of December was irregular: Sinterklaas, Christmas, new-years’ eve, holidays…

And now January is irregular. There are many one-off events (like my sons’ birthday, holidays, study-days where school is closed, school-outings, hackathon at work).

There is no reason to assume February or March will be different. There is never a normal week or a normal day.

What is normal anyway? #

My original mindset was: most days are ’the same’. Similar and predictable: two hours of morning-crazy (breakfast, getting kids to school on time), eight hours of work, five hours of evening, sleep.

And similar days lead to similar weeks. Four-and-a-half days of work, two-and-a-half-day of weekend.

52 times per year a normal week. With perhaps some exceptions, like Christmas, vacation, holidays, birthday, one-off events like a wedding, maybe sickness… When you write it down like that, you quickly realize that there are a lot of vacations, holidays and birthdays. Apparently the exceptions are the norm and ’normal weeks’ are very rare.

New mindset: every day is exceptional #

I sound like a romantic now, but I’ve realized every day is exceptional. When you look at the details, there is no normal day.

Still learning exactly what this means. But at the very least, I should lower my planning-expectations per day.

I feel I’m terribly late in life on realizing this. Probably most readers will facepalm me for stating the obvious 😅

Now on to my ~normal~¹ workday!