Recent quotes:

Scheduling leisure activities makes them less fun: Study finds planning events make them seem like work -- ScienceDaily

While people seem to get less enjoyment out of precisely scheduled activities, they don't seem to mind if they are more roughly scheduled.

5 Things I Learned By Tracking (Nearly) Every Waking Hour

much of what I did didn’t need to be done in the first place, or could be done more efficiently by someone else.

Affluence = time more valuable = multi-tasking

So being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still. Staffan Linder, a Swedish economist, diagnosed this problem in 1970. Like Becker, he saw that heady increases in the productivity of work-time compelled people to maximise the utility of their leisure time. The most direct way to do this would be for people to consume more goods within a given unit of time. To indulge in such “simultaneous consumption”, he wrote, a chap “may find himself drinking Brazilian coffee, smoking a Dutch cigar, sipping a French cognac, reading the New York Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and entertaining his Swedish wife—all at the same time, with varying degrees of success.” Leisure time would inevitably feel less leisurely, he surmised, particularly for those who seemed best placed to enjoy it all. The unexpected product of economic progress, according to Linder, was a “harried leisure class”.

The calendar motivates us

A lot of people want to lose weight. But when, exactly, do they think about dieting? Using Google searches, Dai and his colleagues found that people look up the word “diet” a lot more at the beginning of the week, month and year. […]One study of almost 12,000 students at a large university found that the start of each week, month and year brings a large increase in gym attendance. And in the month following the average undergraduate's birthday, he or she is much more likely to go to the gym -- an effect as great as that produced by keeping the gym open for two more hours.