Maximise your weekend
How to get more organised during the week so you get the most fun from your weekend
Weekends are our happy times. Everything from scientific studies to light-beer commercials confirms this. Which is why it can be so teeth-gnashing to face down a Sunday night
– after two days of grocery shopping, housework and washing – thinking, “I didn’t do anything I wanted to do!” It shouldn’t be that way, says Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work,
Love And Play When No One Has The Time. “Our weekends are uniquely precious, so we have to protect and curate them,” she says. Here’s how:
THURSDAY
Brigid suggests thinking ahead to one thing that will make you really happy – whether it’s reorganising your wardrobe, a few hours of reading time, or going to a family barbecue – and making that your weekend’s ‘tent pole’. Make it doable, but schedule it and commit to it. That way, if you only get one thing done, it’ll be the one you wanted to do most.
FRIDAY
It’s the end of the working week and your desk is still piled with papers. Meanwhile, your brain is so done with the week. This is the time when many of us think, “I’ll just take this work home with me.” Instead, push on through, and don’t let the office follow you out the door. Even just answering an email here or there takes an outsize toll on your weekend, Brigid says. Her best tip: Try to rid your week of ‘busywork’ so you won’t find yourself in this position to begin with. A third of the work that we do, she’s found, is just to prove to others that we are working!
SATURDAY
Great news. Research says you’re likely to wake up in a cheery mood on Saturday – it’s the happiest day of the week! To keep it that way, try to stay away from the shops. Time-use studies say we think of Saturday as our ‘get-stuff-done day’, so you’ll run into less people if you shift your errands to Sunday, late night shopping on Thursday or Friday night, or almost any other time. And if you do have to hit the shopping centre, “The most fulfilling way to get through must-do tasks is to make them structured, meaning setting clear objectives and time limits,” Brigid says. Endlessly wandering aisles doesn’t qualify.
SUNDAY
If you’ve reached the second half of your weekend without doing any socialising, you need to correct that. Saturdays and Sundays remain enjoyable even as more people have flexible work schedules (meaning, say, Tuesdays off instead of Sundays) because they’re the days we’re most likely to find others to play with, studies say. This is also the day you’ll feel the payoff of finishing that paperwork on Friday. It should help ward off ‘Sunday neurosis’, a creeping anxiety that attacks many workers as the start of the working week approaches.