The 3rd Day // Frido

There seems to be no shortage of personal passion projects that I can come up with, projects that I want to do for myself and that bring me a lot of joy. There is, however, a constant obstacle in the way, and that is a real shortage of available time. That is, until recently, when I discovered a method for myself that “created” time, which I now get to spend on said projects, and I could not be happier about that. This method has worked so well (for me, anyway) that I would like to share it with our community.

I named it “The 3rd Day”, and here it goes:

My daily routine is divided into what I can accomplish in the morning and the afternoon, with lunch often being a valuable time to catch up with Wakako on various BK-related projects. In the morning hours, I focus on administrative tasks, which all revolve around the topic of communication. It is responding to inquiries, ordering materials, and communicating with our various vendors.

My afternoon is focused around designing and crafting, some days it is creating the artwork for a new tape that we are designing and some days it is customizing a very special Truly Yours Notebook. To me, my mornings and afternoons are so vastly different that I see them almost as two separate days.

By the time the kids come home from school, we often wrap up our BK tasks and transition into our family routines by preparing dinner. Eventually, somewhere around 8 pm, our bellies and hearts are full, the dishes are done, and the laundry is folded (on a good day). And that is when my 3rd day starts. It is that magical 2-3 hour window after everything is done for the day and before it is time to wind down with a good book for the night.

My passion projects range in scale and scope and take multiple “3rd days” to complete. Some will inadvertently take months of time, perhaps even more. So I devised a strategy to take large ideas and divide them into micro-projects that are small enough to complete during any given 3rd day. Accumulatively, these pieces come together rather quickly to form the whole.

My current passion project (among others) is incense making.

The idea for this came from the intersection of thinking about gifts for the upcoming holidays and our daily walks with Mango through the chaparral of Topanga. One of the native plants, called Mugwort, is abundant near the creek, and in the fall season it has lots of dried, withered leaves. I had learned that Mugwort has many medicinal uses in the local indigenous culture and also has a pleasant scent when used as incense. What if, I thought, I could make this into incense cones to give as gifts?

What followed was a series of micro-projects, spread over the course of a few weeks (I tend to alternate between projects, more on that later). There were a few, very focused research days spent on finding and sourcing the incense mold as well as the right material to be used for combustion and binding. It turns out that there is a Japanese wood powder, which is referred to as “Makko,” that can act as both the binding material and the combustion material simultaneously.

We brought home a few Mugwort leaves collected during our morning walk, being careful not to touch the poison oak that is usually found nearby, or not to take too much from one plant. The Mugwort is then finely chopped and combined with the Makko powder and a little water to create a paste. I then shaped the paste into the molds and let them sit to dry for a while until it was safe to take them out and allow the incense to finish drying out in the air. This process takes a few days of patience.

While I wait to test out the results, I am feeling incredibly grateful for this little gift of time. And the process has been so much fun that I often imagine what else I might want to do with my 3rd day. I write down some ideas in the empty space of my Jiyu planner and let them sit there for a while until they become clearer in my mind...

 If you had a 3rd day, how would you spend it?