I’m not one to celebrate the coming of a weekend as a welcome relief after a week of work grind. But today, I find I am relieved that it is a Saturday and I can hide behind weekend conventions — break, day off, sleep in, snooze, hibernate — and not reply to work-related emails of which there have been far too many this week!
It’s Saturday!
I wrote this in my journal this morning and paused and frowned. I am not the type of person to live for the weekend. I have a fairly flexible weekday life and can often turn any weekday into a weekend. But this week, having taken on a new project, I found it imposed a whole set of limitations and somehow my life was hijacked.
So, by the time today came, in my journal I found myself writing: It’s Saturday! And the force of that exclamation point was overwhelming!
Here, on Medium, I log on to get back to writing my April journal and see that Ryan Holiday is warning me about this tendency for us to live for the weekend. A week earlier, I would have skipped an article like this — “I don’t do weekends!” I would have said to myself — but this morning it spoke to me.
This past week I had my life on hold, postponed my own good work, told myself to just do this “real” work and wait for the weekend.
That’s one bold risk to take considering the arrival of the upcoming weekend is not a thing that I can control.
Holiday tells us it’s time to stop living for the weekend and he quotes a segment from one of his favourite philosophy books written by Marcus Aurelius:
‘You could be good today,’ the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote. ‘But instead, you choose tomorrow.’
I reflect on the week that has passed. A work thing erupted unexpectedly on Tuesday and I had to (had to?) attend to it. I managed to prioritize my Tuesday journal writing, but then stayed up most of the night working. I was frustrated and resentful at the extra time it would take away from other projects I wanted to do and preferred, but I wanted to do it and do it well because the stakes were high.
On Wednesday, I submitted the work and went on to catch up on other things. Thursday, more. Friday, the same.
Ryan Holiday also reflects on his weekdays:
Why is it that I allow Wednesday to suck? Why do I choose for Tuesday to be filled with meetings that I don’t remember agreeing to attend? Or phone calls that I answer?
It’s obviously impossible to live as a sane human being in this world without work, social, and family obligations, but why do these commitments sometimes feel as if they are draining the very lifeforce from your body and soul? We seem to be prepared to do this, to put things off until tomorrow, to suffer now for a better tomorrow, but I’d like to be radical and consider how to have a good day, today.
The main thing is to prioritise incoming opportunities and agendas. This new project I’ve taken on, for example, seems good and worthwhile, and I’m quite privileged to be able to do it. But is it contributing to my being good today? Is a whole day and evening spent in completing creative, sure, but tedious, overall, work to an externally imposed deadline really the schedule I’d like for my days?
Oh come now, but what a great opportunity and it will lead to more and more recognition and more admiration and more work.
And when do I get to do my own good work? I can’t keep putting that off.
You’ve always got tomorrow! The weekend!
Nah. I don’t even know if I will have tomorrow, let alone the weekend.
Remember how long you’ve been putting this off; how many deadlines you’ve been given and you didn’t meet them. At this point, you need to pay attention to the world you’re in and clearly start seeing the rules that govern it and you. There’s a limit to the time you’ve got, you know, and if you don’t use it, it will end and you will end, and it will never return.
So, it needs to be today. And that doesn’t mean giving everything else up. That would be socially awkward! But it does mean that I can do one thing, one good thing, every day. At the beginning of this month, I committed to reducing social media so as to read philosophy, meditate, and write.
This week, I did reduce social media use but filled it with an extra work project. I’m not always going to have weeks like this, but even if another unexpected work project imposes itself heavily upon my desk, I hope I’ll be able to keep the philosophy, meditation, and writing as the priority. It’s the thing that makes me good. And it’s the one thing I must do every day, today.
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