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This is the paradox of weekends: “You have to set an appointment to go off the grid as surely as to go on it.”
Success in a competitive world requires hitting Monday refreshed and ready to go. The only way to do that is to create weekends that rejuvenate you rather than exhaust or disappoint you.
There are sixty hours between the moment you crack open a beer at 6 p.m. Friday and the time the alarm goes off at 6 a.m. Monday. Sixty hours is a decently high percentage of a 168-hour week. Even if you’re asleep for twenty-four of those hours, that still leaves thirty-six hours for waking rejuvenation. That’s the equivalent of a full-time job—and this is a helpful mindset to have. You would not take a thirty-six-hour per week job without asking what you intended to do with it and what you expect the outcome to be.
As Anatole France once wrote, “Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.”
If only doing nothing were restorative....
Failing to think through what you wish to do on the weekend may make you succumb to the “I’m tired” excuse that keeps you locked in the house and not doing anything meaningful within it—even though we draw energy from meaningful things.
a good weekend needs a plan. Not a minute-by-minute plan, not a spreadsheet full of details, but just a few fun anchor events sketched in ahead of time.
The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as
The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick.
Ha!
Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation.
find that three to five anchor events, spread over the sixty hours between that Friday beer and Monday alarm clock, should give you a nice balance.
When you plan enjoyable things ahead of time, you magnify the pleasure.
Successful people know that the best weekends feature activities you love and a minimal amount of anything else.
If your list of roles starts getting unwieldy, you could compress them into the major categories: career, relationships, and self (which includes exercise, hobbies, and anything that moves your soul).
Then think of your top two or three priorities in each area that you’d like to accomplish over the next 168 hours.
blocking six to nine priorities into a 168-hour week still leaves a lot of blank space.
While we often crash into weekends feeling overwhelmed, the impulse to do nothing leads, as one reader told me, to feeling like we’re missing out on our own lives.
don't forget this or get caught up in it.
what are you saving your energy for? This is all there is. Anything could happen and you are not guaranteed another snowman. So make a fuss. Make a show. Spend your energy now.
What the most successful people know about weekends is that life cannot happen only in the future. It cannot wait for some day when we are less tired or less busy.
