LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE

That doesn’t always mean planning something elaborate. How two Bloomberg Businessweek staffers spent recent evenings.

Bryant Urstadt Editor, Steph Curry wannabe

When I need to bring my family together, we have to leave the house. It’s hard to gel inside our apartment: There are screens on the walls, on the desks, hidden in the sofa, and we quickly separate into four individual nodes on the net. One of our favorite activities is basketball. It requires just about no planning, which is helpful since my wife and I both work. Last week, my wife, son, and daughter went to the park to play. My son is perfecting his six-pointer, which is a heave from 200 feet away, and it takes practice. My job is returning the ball to him after he shoots. Sometimes, we all attempt a game together, but mostly we attempt impossible shots. (I like to try to score from behind the basket. It never works.) Without really paying attention to it, we come together, and then we go get frozen yogurt.

Caroline Winter Writer, poodle walker

Summer is the season of Freizeitstress, a German word that describes the (somewhat absurd) twin anxieties of being overscheduled and wondering whether we’re using our free time to the fullest. Which, as someone who gets exhausted from going out after work too many nights in a row, I try to avoid—often unsuccessfully. For example: On a recent Tuesday, my boyfriend and I went to the Japanese Garden Centennial celebration in Brooklyn’s Botanic Garden, where I met several of his relatives. It was nice to be outside, strolling. Jazz pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi played Frank Sinatra’s It Was a Very Good Year. The next night, we saw a friend’s guitar concert. On Thursday, I was supposed to go to a magazine launch party—sorry!—but went to yoga instead, because I lose my mind if I don’t get exercise during the week. Friday I went to see a friend’s new apartment and took his 6-month-old poodle, Sasha, for a walk—a nice, low-key start to what was, of course, a weekend of Freizeitstress.