Blog / May 24th, 2022
Fun and enjoyment
Another month rolls in and with all the wildlife and flora running wild, the imminent Jubilee celebrations, and the excitement of residentials and camps on our minds we can officially call it summer. This month’s reflections are all about fun and enjoyment. How can we make the preparation time more fun, as we squeeze time in around our usually busy lives?
actionforhappiness.org has its usual monthly calendar and in May one of the days suggests you ‘find a way to make what you do today meaningful’. How about adding in ‘find a way to make one of your volunteer tasks fun this week’. Could that be shifting your expectations and relaxing around how much you get done?
Oliver Burkeman, who has presented a webinar online this week ‘How to make good use of our time’ for ActionforHappiness made reference to his new book ‘Time Management for Mortals’ and suggests we accept there will always be things left on our ‘to do list’ and a more useful set of lists might be a ‘to be list’, a ‘done list’ and a ‘stop doing list’. Is it enjoyable to see your ‘done list’ or your ‘to do list’ with lots of ticks on it? Could you use an app to help you stay on top of your preparation? Check out this one from the 80s that asks you to ‘work smarter, not harder’ https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique with its bright tomato timer as its logo it already gives us the sense of something more fascinating than we might expect.
As volunteers sharing your volunteer tasks with someone else may make it more fun or we could see things from the perspective of one of your girls, for example, Rainbows imagining and developing their Superpowers or Brownies getting their hands covered in super soaps as they experiment to find soaps to get rid of grime, grease, and paint (from a UMA).
When I asked our team to come up with some sound bite words off the top of their heads for fun and enjoyment, they included the following: skipping ropes, tent building, campfires, badges, learning, and holidays! So it may be that you’ll be involved with some of those fabulous summer month trips to activity centres or campsites or be inventing new ways to experience outdoor UMAs in an urban setting. For our older girls, festivals certainly feature strongly; see below for a Girlguiding story from our group of 18 – 30 members, with memories of Festival fun and learning amongst them:
Have fun until we blog again next month!