Decorate Your Week: a grounding practice + 3 prompts

why not make some low-stakes time-bound art?

This practice began, for me, with overwhelm. It was the September, and after summer break I suddenly had a calendar full of classes and meetings. I tracked everything in my online calendar, but on Sunday night, when I opened that app, it just looked like virtual words and numbers in the ether. I couldn’t get to an embodied sense of what was coming. So I printed a weekly calendar from an internet template (like this one here), and copied everything by hand. It helped. I did that for the first few weeks of the quarter, until I adjusted to work mode. And then I temporarily abandoned the practice—though I revisited it whenever my schedule got too crowded and I had the sense that I was falling off a tipping boat.

Over the past year, now that my schedule is forever shifting, my calendar practice has evolved and become essential to me. I love calendar day. The practice looks like this:

I have a spiral-bound, undated weekly planner. On Sundays it calls to me.

I fill in the dates and leave myself some notes and goals in the to-do list on the left side of the page. I consult last week’s to-do list to remember what I planned to do but didn’t. But calendar practice is not a time for self-deprecation. I just transfer the still-relevant to-dos and move on.

I open my laptop and copy my digital calendar, day by day, to my analog calendar. Copying each item by hand helps me feel my way into the week’s coming demands. I sense of which days are spacious, which days are crunched.

I hang out with those spaces. I think about protecting them.

But the most recent development in my calendar practice—the fun one, the important one, the restorative one—is decorating the week.

Above the donkey’s head I wrote Nothing Else so I wouldn’t schedule anything new on Friday

This began because I bought a tiny watercolor set and have been learning to play with watercolors. Watercolor paper—which I bought but haven’t used—is so fancy it scares me. It has felt better to play on cheap paper, and even better to doodle on a temporary document.

The doodling is also a way to honor the spaces in my week, and to reflect on time and this place where I live. For instance for doodling inspo, I often open the photos on my phone, and render silly versions of the most recent photos. Some come out better than others, but it brings me joy to see watercolor animals hanging out between scrawled-out meeting times. And then, when I turn the page and start a new week, I miss the old animals and want to draw new ones.

It’s a good way to spend an hour on a Sunday—even when I’m otherwise very busy—because it truly helps me get my head on for the week.

My analog calendar practice has me thinking of other ways we can make art out of our weeks, for instance: