Decide Saturday on Wednesday

Upgrade your weekends by thinking ahead

The work week can be stressful. Often, we don’t give much thought to the weekend — other than a vague hope that it will arrive. We figure we’ll just relax when the time comes.

But unfortunately, for those with complex lives, this laissez-faire approach tends not to lead to real rejuvenation. If you don’t think about what you’d like to do with your time, time tends to get filled with other things: chores, errands, random web surfing and email checks, shuttling family members around, and so forth. You don’t take advantage of options that might be available, like trading off kid-free time with a partner, or meeting up with a friend who also turns out to be free and bored. You don’t manage your energy so that you can get up and go if you’d like to do something adventurous, and you can waste half a weekend day deciding what to do.

Fortunately, all of this can be avoided with one simple habit: Think about Saturday on Wednesday.

Take a few minutes for logistics

Set an alarm or a recurring calendar reminder for some point on Wednesday. You only need a few minutes. This need not be an ordeal. Think about what you’d like to do on Saturday. Look at your calendar and see if there’s anything already happening on Saturday that you need to be aware of. Then figure out any logistics: coordinating with other family members, calling any friends you hope to see, making reservations for that canoe rental, whatever it is.

Now, if you want, you can do the advanced version of weekend planning and think about Sunday too. But I find that if you know you’re doing something fun on Saturday, then it can be OK to let Sunday go more free-form. Even if you do nothing beyond scroll around online, at least Saturday gives you some answer to the question of “what did you do this weekend?” You can also do the really advanced version of weekend planning and incorporate it into your regular weekly planning time. I tend to recommend planning the upcoming workweek on Fridays, which would mean looking at the weekend that’s happening in 8-9 days.

Finding that sweet spot

But I recognize that not everyone wants to look that far ahead (and sometimes people are confused if you ask about getting together not this Saturday, but the one after). Wednesday tends to be a sweet spot where you’re close enough to the weekend to get a good sense of the landscape and the weather, but you’re far enough back that you can probably get reservations, or make plans with friends without them being booked up, or hire a babysitter if you need one.

Waiting until Saturday to think about Saturday will artificially limit your options. Rather than executing on a plan you’ve already made, you’ll have to come up with a plan and execute on it. Often that involves a bit more effort than many of us can muster on the weekend.

Set a time on Wednesday to think through Saturday, and you won’t have this problem.