How to Create Your Personal Summer Fun List

Jul 5

May 2021 Update: Our seasonal fun lists continue to be a hit for our family. You can see our 2021 Summer Fun List here.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I love a good celebration. As I’ve watched good friends and close family members pass in the last handful of years, it’s become even more important to me to celebrate life wherever we can find it, because there’s no way to know how much more time any of us has left for those moments.

I enjoy celebrating holidays with countdowns (two favorites here and here), and this year we’re about a month into enjoying a “Summer Fun List” for our family (I’ll link to it below!). We have two little kids, but there’s no reason this idea should be limited to families with kids. Everyone deserves a list of fun things to look forward to making happen!

One of my favorite authors, Laura Vanderkam, writes in Off the Clock that you can help take your happiness to the next level by investing both in the anticipation of fun activities and in the deliberate remembering of those fun things as memories afterward. A summer fun list is a low-key and impactful way to put this science-backed happiness strategy to work for you.

We created our summer fun list without a lot of fuss:

I started by opening a Google Doc and putting in some ideas of things I wanted to do this summer - things we love to do already, and new ideas I’ve been wanting to try.
I added more ideas while doing some googling about fun summer activities in our area. I found some gems this way, like looking for sea glass at Point Molate.
I finished the list by asking my family to add their ideas. The kids wanted to do things like making LEGO towers and showing them to our neighbors. Sounds good, kids.

We then printed the list, stuck it on a clipboard on a thumbtack on the wall, and we’ve been using it to generate ideas when we’re thinking about our weekend or need something interesting to do on a weeknight.

Here’s our 2020 Stewart Family Fun List - feel free to make a copy and edit away to make it the perfect list for you!

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