Create a smarter weekend to-do list

Hit Monday feeling relaxed and accomplished

If you’re like me, your weekends don’t feature a ton of open space. Your kids have activities, and they need to be fed and cared for as they would on any other day. Accomplishing anything beyond basic life maintenance is challenging.

That can be an issue because inevitably there are things beyond basic life maintenance that do need to be accomplished over the weekend. Some task or errand didn’t get done during the week. Some periodic chore, like getting the kids’ hair cut, needs to happen. Or maybe it’s an ongoing house project, like emptying out the boxes in the guest bedroom … so you have a usable guest bedroom.

Productive sorts know to make to-do lists for the work week, so we make to-do lists for the weekend too. Unfortunately, people make the same to-do list mistakes on weekends as they do during the week!

But don’t fret: there is a better way. You can create a weekend to-do list that actually helps you feel accomplished and less stressed.

The litany of to-do list sins

Here’s the first thing that can go wrong: Creating an overly ambitious list.

No, you will not get through a six month backlog of home projects this weekend. Have you seen how much else is going on? Do you think you’re going to stumble upon some magical well of superhuman energy and hours in the day you didn’t know existed? You cannot unpack the whole guest room and clean out the garage and fill out all the camp forms and read through all your employee review files and bake banana bread with those bananas that are going to go bad before Sunday night.

When we make lengthy to-do lists, we can’t get through everything on the list. And what’s the point of that? There is no virtue in putting something on a to-do list and then not doing it. It’s just as not done as if you never put it on the list. Only now you feel bad too.

For a to-do list to work, it needs to be a contract with yourself. You are only putting something on the list because you actively plan to do it. You plan to do it even with everything else that is going on and everything else that might come up. That means the list needs to be short.

The second sin is vagueness. To-do lists need to be specific. What camp forms? Which employee review files? How much of the guest room are we talking?

A doable weekend to-do list might include unpacking two boxes in the guest room, making the banana bread, and reviewing one employee file — because you’re meeting with that person on Tuesday and you can see that Monday will be swamped. Everything else is going to have to happen some other time, or it just won’t happen.

The blessing of low expectations

Perhaps that sounds like giving up, but I think it’s more discouraging to put 20 items on the list, only get to three of them, and then feel like you haven’t done anything. If you put three specific things on the list — the 2 boxes, the banana bread, and one file — you will probably do them. You’ll feel like you’re moving forward. You will feel accomplished.

And when you have done those things, or have identified times when you will do those things, then you can let yourself off the hook the rest of the time. You don’t need to feel bad when you’re watching your toddler that you aren’t reading the rest of the employee files. You won’t feel relaxed, because watching a toddler isn’t relaxing. But you won’t feel like you should be doing something else, and that tends to be the major source of weekend stress.