WEEKEND WARRIOR
Toronto author Katrina Onstad wants you to reconsider time spent away from work,
When’s the last time you had a truly enjoyable weekend — one free from checking work emails, rushing between appointments and, most importantly, one that left you feeling rejuvenated and ready to take on the week ahead?
In her new book The Weekend Effect, available Tuesday, Toronto author Katrina Onstad challenges the “cult of overwork” and underlines the importance of taking back those 48 hours of “off” time that have been eroded in an ever-competitive economy and constantly connected world.
Onstad chatted with the Star about why Europeans are taking the right approach to leisure, how the ondemand gig economy has done away with set work hours and why weekends seem a little more magical when you’re younger. First things first — did you work weekends to finish the book?
This is a very sensitive question. Yes, of course I did. I’m human and I’m a human freelancer, which is even worse, and sadly I did hit some crunch periods with this book where I had to work on the weekend. But I will say in my defence, I would always try and protect some zone of the weekend, so maybe not work on the Saturday but work for several hours on the Sunday and make sure those hours had a start and a stop. When did realize your weekends weren’t actually relaxing?
It was a gradual decline of quality on the weekends. There’s four of us in my house and we were all feeling burnt out and really had those cliché Sunday night blues. It was not the weekends I remembered from when I was young, when there was so much possibility and we would feel a little bit altered for the better on a Sunday night. What was it about weekends when you were younger that made them more relaxing?
Well, not having to earn money is great. But I think those great weekends that we remember are usually very social, they involve human connection and some kind of almost escape from the self, like any kind of activity where you can get into that flow state and really feel like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. So the romance and the potential of the weekend is something that I think you can really feel when you’re young and it’s important to try and get back into it. Before crunch time on the book, did you take a coldturkey approach to reclaiming your weekends, or was it a gradual process?
I don’t want to come off as cold, and I think we have to be realistic about our different kinds of obligations, which change week to week. But for me, it’s really been about sparking this awareness of my time and investigating my time to see if I’m using it wisely and if not, if diversion is the main substance of my weekend or work is the main substance of my weekend, then I really have to pull back. In the book, you talk about how Europeans, generally, have a different approach to work than Canadians or Americans. How did that difference arise?
I think in North America, there’s always been this work-identified culture — this is the New World, right? Work and self are really intertwined, and I think that, this is a generalization, but in many developed Western European countries, there’s a different relationship to time and maybe not as monetized a relationship to time. What we’ve also seen is that governments over there have been quicker to pick up on the downside of work-dominated culture and so you see in France, legislation passed to enshrine the right to disconnect, and Germany has also put in place some of these kinds of initiatives to protect their workers’ free time. We’re a bit behind here, and I think a lot of it has to do with this work-first mentality. In the book, you write about the “gig economy” and how convenience for people using on-demand services means the disruption of steady work hours for others. How can people such as Uber drivers block off time and reclaim their weekends?
There’s been a massive shift in the way people work and I think our institutions really haven’t caught up to the humanity that’s required for this shift. There was a poll that showed more than 50 per cent of Toronto workers are now doing precarious work, so those kinds of workers are going to have a really hard time finding that conventional Saturday-Sunday weekend. I think the first thing we need to do as a society is examine how equitable our labour practices are and what we need to improve so that workers are being treated fairly and getting a healthy amount of time off. And then, on a personal level, we probably have to reframe our idea of the weekend so that even if our “weekend” falls on a Wednesday and a Friday, you can be really conscious about not squandering it.
Toronto’s such a work-oriented city and I think it’s something we really need to examine on a systemic level as well as in our own private lives. It’s not just selfhelp. There are a lot of forces at work that have compromised our weekends and our free time, and if those don’t change, then the onus can’t just be on the individual, it has to be a sort of a larger social shift toward healthy work habits.