Hey, Radicals, welcome to the podcast. Today I have a very short coaching message for you. I'm going to take off my financial advisor hat for a moment, put on my life coach hat, talk to you about the power of planning your free time. It's been a busy week for me this week.

I've been working, working, working on a number of important projects, trying to make measurable progress toward some of the goals that I have. This week's been busy. I've been working a lot because looking forward to the birth of our new little baby boy here in a couple of months.

The birth of a child is a very special time in my life, in your life. It's extremely special in your relationship with your husband or wife. It's a time to pull back, and I intend to do that, pull back a little bit when our little baby boy is born.

It's also potentially very disruptive. When our daughter was born, for the first few months of her life, first week she was great. For the first few months, she was extremely sick, basically would cry all day, every day, and it was probably the most trying few months of my life that I've been through yet.

Being aware of that, I need to make sure that I've made progress now while our little baby boy is not crying. He's inside his mommy's tummy. He's not crying. He's maybe sucking his thumb and he's turning cartwheels. He's not turning cartwheels at this point. He's gotten big enough where he doesn't turn easy cartwheels, but he's not crying.

This is the point in time at which I need to be making hay to mix my metaphors. It's been a busy week, and for you, I bet it's been a busy week as well. You're a hardworking person. You're a motivated, goal-oriented individual. You've been working. The question is here as I sit here on Friday afternoon transitioning to planning the weekend, do I spend as much time carefully planning my weekend as I do planning my work week?

I have to confess that I'm as guilty as you are of placing more focus on my work week than on my weekend. I've changed this, and I've learned to intentionally plan my free time. My wife and my children and my friends and my family and all of the people with whom I'm interacting are the reason why we spend so much time working so hard.

It's easy to forget that. After all, work is measurable, but shouldn't your days off also be measurable? Why would you spend more time planning your work week in order to be effective and not spend any time planning your days off? So as I sit here, I've made great progress in planning my days off.

As I sit here working on my plans for tomorrow, Saturday, which is a combination of work day and family day and Sunday, which I don't work on Sundays, when I start planning these things I've found that I get a lot more juice from them, a lot more joy. Here's what I challenge you to do.

Stop what you're doing. Pull over to the side of the road for a few minutes if you're driving or if you're listening to me. Just stop what you're doing and pull out a pen and a piece of paper or the digital equivalent of that and start thinking through your weekend days.

Plan out your weekend days with as much focus as you do your work week days. I was on a coaching call with one of my coaching clients earlier this afternoon and we were talking about this and the recommendations that I gave to my client were to take out a piece of paper, start the day at the same normal time that you do.

I don't know about you. I think I prefer to wake up at the same time on the weekends as I do on the weekdays. It's just more important and valuable for me to have my early morning time. But if you start the day at 6 a.m., start the day at 6 a.m.

and sketch out each hour of the day and plan first your activities. So what activities are you going to do that are going to rejuvenate you and refresh you and strengthen you and revitalize you? What activities are going to make you really feel the zest of living? What activities are available to you that you often go past?

What's the museum right around the corner? Don't just sit at home and start flipping through channels. Go out and live, whatever that means to you. That means working in your garden. Plan it out. What are you going to do in your garden tomorrow? What are you going to plant?

What are you going to take out? If you're going to work on projects in the house, line them up. What are you going to do? What do you need to get done? If you're going to go and go out on the paddle boards or take the canoes out on the lake, plan it out and plan that day.

Plan each and every hour of the day. Plan times with the special people. Maybe you're going to plan to get up in the morning, have breakfast together with your family, you're going to load up your bags and load up some water bottles and take your family out for a hike.

You're going to hike out to the lake and have a picnic at the lake. Plan it. Maybe the afternoon you can take your daughter on a daddy-daughter date or you can take your son to something special and go and buy your son something special that he's been wanting to have.

Maybe in the evening you can plan a special family adventure. Just plan a special date with your husband or wife and make it really special and thoughtful. Dress up, buy flowers, make it an event, especially when it comes to our family relationships. I'm not preaching at you about romance, but it's so easy.

I guess I am. I am preaching at you about romance. The point of this is to plan your free time, but romance is an important part of that. It's so easy to take the people we care the most about for granted. It's so easy to slip out of the care that we once showed for them and to slip into the comfort of an old slipper.

Take them for granted. Tell you what, you take your husband or your wife for granted, first year you'll just have a little bit of a dullness in the relationship. Second year, you'll just have a little bit of dullness in the relationship, but you do it too much longer and pretty quickly you'll be signing divorce papers.

So don't take your husband or wife for granted. Plan your time with them as vigorously as you plan your work week. We all say that these things are important to us. We all say that it's important to spend focused time with the people we care about. Isn't it time we follow through and put our planning skills, our calendaring skills, our productivity skills, and our money where our mouth is?

Get to it. My child arrived just the other day. He came to the world in the usual way, but there were planes to catch and bills to pay. He learned to walk while I was away, and he was talking for I knew it, and as he grew he'd say, "I'm gonna be like you, Dad.

You know I'm gonna be like you." And the cats in the cradle and the sills roll, little boy blue and the man in the fold. When you're coming home, Daddy, don't know when, but we'll get together then. You know we'll have a good time then. My son turned ten just the other day.

He said, "Thanks for the ball, Dad. Come on, let's play. Can you teach me to throw?" I said, "Not today. I got a lot to do." He said, "That's okay." And he walked away, but he smiled, never did, and said, "I'm gonna be like him. Yeah, you know I'm gonna be like him." And the cats in the cradle and the sills roll, little boy blue and the man in the fold.

When you're coming home, Daddy, don't know when, but we'll get together then. You know we'll have a good time then. You know I'm gonna be like him. You know I'm gonna be like him. You know I'm gonna be like him. You know I'm gonna be like him. You know I'm gonna be like him.

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