Intentional Summer Planning

If you catch me on my daily walks, you’ll often find me stopping in my tracks — to admire a wildflower that just bloomed, to watch a baby rabbit eagerly digging in a neighbor’s yard, or simply to listen to the wind moving through the trees. Earlier this week, on my walk home from the gym, I noticed a group of adults playing pickup baseball in Centralia. With my schedule clear, I sat on a bench to watch. At one point, the batters hit a few balls that nearly cleared the fence directly toward me, and I found myself quietly hoping they wouldn’t make it over. As much as I play badminton regularly, I’m not entirely confident in my ability to throw a baseball back.

But there is a paradox to this season. Because the sun in the Pacific Northwest, especially Washington, is such a precious commodity, we often feel a subtle, frantic pressure to make the most of it. It seems everyone — toddlers, children, and adults alike — is out and busy. We want to capture every high-spirited moment and soak up every minute of clear skies, so we fill our calendars with must-dos. Looking back on my own summer last year, I realize I spent it mostly winging it. While I loved the activities, the season eventually blurred into a happy, ungrounded blob. I was busy, but I wasn't intentional.

This summer, I’m approaching my calendar with the same principles I use to organize a home: choosing quality over quantity and creating intentional space for the habits and connections that matter to me. Purposeful planning is the difference between being controlled by our schedules and mindfully controlling them.

Choosing What Matters

In my work and in my conversations with others, I have noticed a pattern in how we approach summer. We tend to treat our time and our homes as containers that need to be filled.

This often leads us to fill our calendars with activities just because an invitation arrived or because we feel we should be out and about, even when we are not particularly enthusiastic or interested. Similarly, we fill our homes with things because they were offered to us, were on sale, or seemed like things we should own. But the more I observe and listen to stories, the more I learn that volume rarely equals value. When a calendar is packed with obligations that do not nourish us, or a living space is crowded with items that do not serve a purpose, the result is the same: we end up busy tracking activities and managing our belongings, which leads to stress, overwhelm, and exhaustion.

I have found that the most effective way to organize, whether in a physical space or on a calendar, is to say yes to fewer, better things with confidence. When we do this, we give ourselves the opportunity to actually enjoy the season and our homes.

Defining Your Summer

To design your summer intentionally, try conducting a practical audit of your current and upcoming plans:

Define Your Vision: Before you make any changes, consider how you want to spend your time and how you want to feel. Identify 1–3 areas of your life that would make you feel more fulfilled and satisfied, such as your health, relationships, or community. When you start with a clear picture, you have a filter for every decision you make.

Audit Your Activities: Review your calendar and ask whether each activity brings you genuine joy or serves a necessary purpose. Not everything has to be exciting to be valuable; some are simply essential tasks that support the life you want to live.

Let Go of the Rest: If an activity does not serve your vision, support your daily life, or bring you joy, remove it from your schedule. When you decide to let something go, do so with gratitude for the invitation or the person it represented.

Evaluate New Opportunities: When you receive a new invitation or activity, ask whether it supports your vision. If it does not, saying no protects the ones that do.

By choosing fewer, but better, you can actually enjoy your time instead of managing it.

A Practice of Intentionality

We often let "shoulds," "woulds," and “coulds” dictate how we spend our time. This habit shapes not only what we bring into our homes but also the choices we make in every other area of our lives.

Taking one season to practice intentionality builds confidence. When you spend three months consciously choosing what to say yes to — and what to say no to — you build a habit that serves you long after the summer ends. The skill you learn can carry over into fall, winter, and spring, eventually becoming your new standard.

At its core, organizing is a tool that teaches us these skills. Using the summer as training is an extension of that work. It proves that the same clarity we use to organize a home can be applied to our schedules, habits, and priorities.