Do you ever feel like you’ve wasted a day? Like it kind of just happened, it’s over and you wish you could go back and re-do it with something more exciting or productive?

You aren’t the only one. I have a chronic problem of wasting Sundays.

I go to bed Saturday night thinking I’m going to wake up the next morning with a plan in hand. One final hoorah of adventure, relaxation, or excitement before the next work week begins.

Nope.

I’m more of an aimless drifter around my house. I’ll read some and maybe watch a little TV. But then I get up and wander from room to room, because I can’t sit still or relax.  I’ll want to go for a run, clean my room, do laundry, balance my check book, or a number of other productive adult things, but I barely ever manage to make it happen. I’m torn between wanting to be doing things and not wanting to do anything at all.

It’s a weird contradiction. And the bane of my every Sunday.

It also doesn’t help that lately we’ve been getting 80-90 degree weather. Meaning…it’s too hot and stuffy for any kind of movement or happiness.

In truth, I know what I need to do to combat my chronic wasting of Sundays. When having a blah day, I should work on something from my goals list.

I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to follow this advice. Maybe it’s because it’s harder to climb out of a blah day once I’m in it. And I haven’t been planning against blah Sundays in advance.

I’ve been wanting to bike 100 miles in a day for awhile. It’s kind of an arbitrary number, based on the hope that one day I’ll bike from Pittsburgh to DC via the Great Allegheny Passage (360-something miles one way). Obviously, I’m going to build up to that. So last week I told myself I was going to bike 50 miles that weekend and began preparing for a Sunday trip, since tackling a bucket list item milestone would NOT be an act of day wasting.

Well…I did it! I biked 25 miles out on the Montour Trail in Pittsburgh and biked 25 miles back to my car. I was exhausted by the end of it, but I felt really, really good afterwards. And can you believe that I did two loads of laundry when I got home??? I felt like superwoman. And then I finally sat down and happily did nothing.

I guess the lesson learned is that I need to thoroughly wear myself out to happily and contently sit still and relax.

And that perhaps for Sundays, I need to plan ahead of time and tell myself I will knock x, y, and z from my goal list. And I will like it and be happy. No more wasting Sundays.