Hitting the Brakes on Saturday

This morning I became aware of a challenge and related frustration I face on Saturdays. On weekends where I’m fortunate not to have to work to hit urgent deadlines, the challenge is to let myself hit the brakes and shift out of work gear and into weekend gear. The frustration is that the shift doesn’t happen as quickly, easily and automatically as I’d like it to happen.

(BTW, I’m having trouble focusing right now. I think it’s because it’s early in the evening on Saturday, later than when I usually like to write. The later in the day I write, the more distractions I need to fend off, since more of the day has passed, giving me more things to think about and process. I find it harder to avoid online distractions when I turn on my laptop later in the evening, which scatters my thoughts even further. Finally, knowing that I’m writing later in the day gives me more time to think about what to write, which increases my tendency to try and get the writing “just right”. I’m hoping that writing these asides helps to refocus me…let’s see…)

I think that until today, I’ve always felt like just waking up knowing it’s a Saturday should be enough to automatically switch gears for me. Working primarily from a home office makes that more difficult. I learned today that if I don’t actively resist the momentum pushing me toward my weekday work routine, I can easily settle into it. I also have to really resist the temptation to use even a couple of hours to catch up on things. The weekend can sometimes look tempting, as extra bonus time I can be use to catch up on things that have lingered through the week, however are not particularly urgent.

This is problematic for me because a two day weekend could easily be shortened into a one and a half or even one day weekend. The difficulty there is that I’ve learned that I’m much more productive during the week when I wake up on Monday having really taken a break and recharging over the weekend.

So this morning I didn’t recognize the temptation to clear out my non-urgent Inbox and was quickly sucked into the hole of online distractions. I felt the tension start to built as I began to energize myself with the prospect of clearing out the Inbox. One thing I did right was to set a 25 minute Pomodoro Timer. This helped me time box what I was doing. When the timer expired, I looked up, took a breath and realized the tension that was beginning to build wasn’t worth the end goal. Thankfully, I had a yoga class to get to shortly after that, which was what I really needed to help shift gears.

I’m glad the Pomodoro Timer was there to bring me back to a state of conciousness, where I could take a few deep breaths, pause, and reevaluate what I was trying to get done, why I was trying to get it done, and recognize the mental and physical effects it was having on me. This exercise helped emphasize to me that recharging and taking a break on the weekends, when that is possible, requires a concious effort on my part. Part of that concious effort is to make the decision on Friday evening to hit the brakes on Saturday morning, making it easier to roll into the weekend.