Tranquility by Tuesday summary

“I’m so exhausted.” “Bedtime with my kids takes so much time that I can never relax before I go to sleep.” “I’m so busy doing chores, but I feel like I never accomplish anything.”

Sound familiar?

When you’re stuck in the daily grind, it can be difficult to feel as though you’re truly living a successful life. Success is often defined by its trappings: the chic house in the right zip code, the child in an Ivy League school, the corner office. But rather than seeking success in these so-called big accomplishments, what if you started to look for it in the ordinary parts of your days instead?

Success doesn’t have to live in a tangible end result; it can reside in the well-lived everyday experience. And how do you make those days well-lived? By being intentional. There are nine specific steps you can use to achieve a more peaceful, productive, and mindful life. By dividing your time into weeks and being deliberate in how you arrange them, you’ll be able to achieve both results and tranquility. 

Time management is both an art and a craft. The nine methods we’re going to lay out here involve taming this beast. The first step may look familiar to parents – but it might not be something you enforce on yourself. It’s a little thing called setting a bedtime.

A typical adult needs between seven and nine hours of sleep. Although many people report sleeping between seven and nine hours a night, most are still tired and groggy the next day. That’s because the quality of that sleep didn’t necessarily match up to the quantity. 

Instead of going to bed at 10:00 p.m., maybe you dozed off with your toddler at 8:00 p.m., startled awake at 9:00 p.m., finished kitchen chores, and then stayed up watching a movie – only to fall asleep on the couch at 11:30 p.m. That sleep, although it may add up to eight hours, won’t have the same restful impact as going to bed at 10:30 p.m. and waking up at 6:30 a.m.

To achieve more restful sleep, implement this simple strategy. Count backward from your desired wakeup time to figure out when you need to go to bed, and aim for between seven and nine hours of sleep. Set an alarm for 15 minutes before that bedtime, so you can begin winding down. This strategy may seem obvious, but it has far-reaching results.