Embrace the second half of the week

How to achieve true work/life balance

I track my time on weekly spreadsheets. These have the days of the week across the top, Monday to Sunday, and half hour blocks down the left hand side, from 5:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. These 336 cells represent the 168-hour week.

When I first started filling out these spreadsheets regularly about 11 years ago, I quickly had a revelation. When I was wrapping up my workday on Thursday, and filling in the past few hours, I was in the exact middle of the spreadsheet. You could stick a pin in there and it would balance. There was still an entire second half of the week to go.

Now the reason this was surprising is that I think many of us are more focused on the first half of the week. It takes up a lot of space, mentally, which makes 5 p.m. on Thursday feel somewhat like the end of the week.

But it isn’t. It is only the halfway mark. There is a lot of joy to be found — and a much more rational view of work/life balance to be attained — by embracing the second half of the week.