Weekends are real days too

Don't discount time, just because it's not during the work week

One reason I like to think of life in weeks (168 hours) rather than days (24 hours) is that looking at a week shows us how much space there is. Someone working 40 hours a week, and sleeping 8 hours a night (56 hours per week) would still have 72 waking, non-working hours for other things. Someone working 50 hours a week would have 62 waking, non-working hours. That’s still more time than he or she is working!

I find this all quite encouraging. But when I first wrote about this years ago, and suggested that maybe a bit of the wailing about how “no one can have it all” was misplaced, someone countered with the argument that sure, the math might show 62-72 hours, but “a lot of that time occurs on the weekend.”

I puzzled through this critique for a while. Was the implication that weekend hours aren’t real hours? That the only time that “counts” for enjoying your family and friends, or volunteering in your community, is 10 o’clock on Tuesday?

I don’t know — but I do know that my critic probably isn’t the only person with this belief. Indeed, many people walk around with the assumption that if you do something on the weekend, well, that’s just the weekend. It’s Monday to Friday that matter.

Weekend warriors

This narrative plays out in all sorts of odd ways. Someone who goes to the gym Monday, Wednesday, and Friday might talk about their regular exercise routine. They might even feel compelled to tell other people how they make time for exercise in their busy life! Someone who goes to the gym Saturday and Sunday might confess that he is just a weekend warrior — only doing it on the weekend. But that’s only one less time per week than the other person! If our weekend warrior managed to exercise at some point on Friday he’d be going just as many times as our “regular” gym goer.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are real days. What you do on these days counts as much toward your life as whatever you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. One of the rules I talk about in Tranquility by Tuesday, my most recent time management book, is that “Three times a week is a habit.” Whatever we do three times a week is happening frequently enough in our lives to be a part of our identities. Three is often more doable than every single day, which most people don’t do in any case. People talk about doing something “daily,” but what they often mean is Monday to Friday — and that is not every day. It’s only five days a week. We’re skipping two real days.

Aim for three

In any case, what this means is that if there’s something you want to have fit into your life, and you seem to come up short during the workweek, simply aim to do it Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Many times, people have at least somewhat more discretionary time on those days. Perhaps there is some benefit to spacing things out, but there’s even more benefit to just doing things, whenever works. If that happens to be on weekends, so be it.

I was thinking of this during a recent week when I got to Thursday and I hadn’t managed to run at all. I could have lamented this — that my busy schedule left no time to run — but instead I decided to run when I could do it on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Just like that I had run three times a week. I still felt like a runner. It didn’t happen every day, and it didn’t happen Monday to Thursday, but it didn’t have to.

So many other things can benefit from this same mindset. Even if you can’t have family meals Monday through Thursday, maybe you can have pizza together on Friday, a Saturday pancake breakfast, and hamburgers together on Sunday. Just like that, you are a family that eats together.

Maybe you often travel during the week. But you could be the person putting your kids to bed and reading them bedtime stories Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Just like that, you’re a person who reads with your kids regularly, even with all you have going on.

Weekends are real days too, and we see that, it opens up possibilities, even in very full lives.