“Product” Manage Your Weekends to Recharge Consistently!
For a very long time, when someone asked me “What are you doing this weekend?”, my response used to be “Work” or “Catch up on sleep”. Two years ago when I was showing signs of burnout and refactored my life a bit. I stumbled into a book by Laura Vanderkam called “What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend” that changed my perspective on weekends and helped me manage my energy much better.
Here are my lessons on “What was holding me back” and “What changes I made” to show up energized on Monday.
What gets in the way of a rejuvenating weekend?
Equating leisure to doing nothing: Typically I am exhausted by the time the weekend rolls over and my sleep tracking app is reminding me that I’m in terrible sleep debt. I assumed the best way to relax over a weekend is to do nothing and catch up on sleep. But humans are not built to rejuvenate by doing nothing which essentially means watching tv or staring at our phones.
Leaving the weekend up to chance: Every week as Friday rolled over I had no plan for what I would do over the weekend, I assumed that I would figure it out on Saturday. And then my wife and I would spend most of Saturday thinking about what we could do and it most often resulted in eating out/in. We then promised each other than we would do better next week!
Ever Expanding Chores: Chores have a way of expanding to fit all the free time I have on weekends. It could start with as random a thing as “we need bananas for our breakfast shake, let's make a trip to Safeway” and end with “us returning home a few hours later having stopped by Costco, returned something at REI, and having stopped by the office for some printouts for some work I need to do later”. Every weekend I would feel exhausted by Sunday night having spent an incredible amount of time on unnecessary chores.
Constantly thinking about work: I work in a demanding job where work spills over into the weekend more often than not. But I never let work out of my mind even for an hour whether it was at that Safeway or at dinner. I may have worked only a couple of hours but I thought about it the entire freaking weekend!
How to have a fun weekend?
Fun comes from labours of a different sort: Humans are meant to rejuvenate by doing different things they enjoy rather than not doing anything. It is like cross training for the soul: exercise different muscles on different days using a variety of activities. I discovered a number of activities I wanted to invest my time in: improving my tennis technique by taking lessons, getting into better physical shape by taking Orange Theory Fitness (OTF) classes, cooking, taking walks in different neighborhoods, summarizing books I admire, developing a writing practice and a desire to build an online course. My wife decided that she wanted to do some of the activities I was taking on and in addition pick up on her interest in learning to play the keyboard.
List of 100 dreams: In addition to investing in hobbies we started on a list of 100 things we wanted to do within a few hours of where we lived, finishing the list is a different story altogether. Some of these were things we could do in a few hours, visiting the Japanese tea garden in the Golden Gate park which is less than an hour away and others were a full weekend activity such as driving up the coast in Marin county to stay in an AirBnB. Now we weren’t starting with a blank page when we needed to plan a weekend.
Plan weekends: We took the approach Laura suggested and started doing two things (i) planning the weekend on Friday night (ii) Build the weekend plan around 4/5 anchor events and then leave the rest of the time for spontaneous activities. A typical weekend might have 2 or 3 events that were common across all weekends like a tennis lesson, OTF class, walks in the neighborhood and calling my parents. In addition I would sprinkle in one or two different things like calling a specific friend or doing a special activity from the 100 dreams list.
Compress chores: We decided that we won’t do any chores on Sat & Sun. So we now cook and clean on Friday night when we are exhausted and don't want to think. Physical labor seems doable at that time. We cook 3 dishes for the entire week, do dishes and put everything away before going to bed on Friday. Come Sat & Sun we don’t have to worry about chores while having delicious healthy food for the rest of the week and a clean house.
Timebox work: There will always be a lot of work to do but getting downtime is critical to creativity and productivity. Ideally time boxing weekend work to specific time blocks and putting devices away for the rest of the time is a great path here. This is something I am not good at as of now as I haven’t found the right time slot for weekend work where I have recovered from the week that I can engage in deep work again but don’t wait too long that I don't have enough time left to get my work done.. My goal is to timeblock Saturday afternoons for catching up on work so that I can relax completely on Sunday.
Ending the weekend on a high: One way that Laura says you can extend the pleasure of a weekend is by planning something fun for Sunday evening. Our ritual is to go for a walk after dinner and do relaxation yoga before going to bed.
Doing all of these together makes for a mind blowingly great weekend! I do at least some of these consistently and it has made a huge difference to how I show up on Monday.