My childless weeks are my “getting things done” weeks. I have more time and more energy. I love spending time with them, but I’m an introvert, and spending time with people inevitably wears me out.

When I’m alone in the house, there is always the temptation to just spend my evenings reading and knitting. While that is nice, I do want and need to do more than that. A trick that really helps me stay out of the sofa trap and actually get something done is to commit in advance. On office days, I use my bicycle commute home to decide on what I’ll do in the evening. Just sort of mull my options over and pick something that I feel I’d be in the mood for doing on this particular day. By the time I get home, I’ve had enough time to let the options roll around in my head that one or a few of them have come out top and then settled there, solidly enough that they feel like a promise.

Today’s commitment was to drive to the big recycling station with the last junk from the basement clean-out and a pile of plastic pots from all the plants I bought recently. Normally I’d leave this for the weekend, but really a weekday evening after rush hour is the perfect time for this errand. Traffic isn’t bad and the recycling station is desolate.

Had I come home, eaten dinner, sat down in the sofa, started thinking about whether I should do something… I know for sure that I would never have found the energy to get up again for an hour-long errand. But now I was already in motion, so it wasn’t such a big deal.