If you live to eighty, you’ll get a little over four thousand weekends. That’s plenty, and it’s not infinite.

Counting a life in weekends makes it the right size to think about. Four thousand is a big number, enough that you can waste a few hundred without ruining anything, and it is still a number you could write on a page. That is the useful part: not panic, just the end of pretending the supply is endless.

Look at the next four weekends and pick one to actually plan rather than let happen. Decide who is in it and what you want out of it. The other three can stay completely ordinary, which is what most of the four thousand are for.