The Weekend Trap
When I started working back in 2014, I had this presence in my life that reminded me that weekends were for winding down and that any type of work had no place in the couch where I was supposed to veg out. When I felt like watching TED videos all afternoon, there was a voice whispering in my ear that I should watch this movie (that I never intended to watch anyway) on TV. When I wanted to sit down and go on Coursera to learn a little bit about operations management, the voice would call me to bed to take a nap. I hated it. It was not the ideal weekend for a Type A person, especially not for a Type A+ (what my Type A friends call me, the most Type A of the Type A’s).
The kind of weekend I used to have back then was a ‘pause’ — my activities didn’t move me forward. And that kind of weekend was a trap: I lost my momentum and then found myself clawing my way out by Sunday evening / Monday morning to get back to the weekday grind.
What a waste of energy. If you’re familiar with Newton’s laws of motion, you’d know what I’m talking about: the heavier your workload is, the harder it is to stop; and it’s just as hard to put it back in motion.
Now I’m not saying that you should work on weekends. All I’m saying is that there shouldn’t be any shame when you have to. I mean, I was raised by parents who didn’t have 9–5 jobs; they were in business and consulting so I never had the ‘weekends are sacred’ mindset. As a child, I didn’t think it was harmful to have back-to-back workdays because I’ve seen my parents take their deserved R&Rs when the hustle and bustle of a major event was over. As an adult, that thinking has evolved into being responsible enough to know when to take long breaks. It just so happens that weekly ones are too much for me.
I might not work during all of my weekends, but because I am naturally a restless person, I have to keep the ball rolling. I don’t believe that you can ‘conserve’ your energy for Monday because let’s be real here, you could lose that energy — oh, yeah, law of conservation of energy — to something else. Ever wake up from a 10-hour slumber and feel exhausted? Sleeping in on weekends won’t ‘recharge’ your energy, so why won’t you spend it on something more fulfilling?
Listen to a podcast while cleaning your room. Try to check something off your reading list. I’m not trying to stop you from doing something you enjoy on weekends. If marathoning an entire season of Sherlock is the type of activity that keeps your gears turning, why not? I like playing games with my brothers because it still keeps me on my toes despite it being a recreational activity. I write essays like this to maintain my writing momentum. Reading a couple of articles I saved on my Pocket makes me feel equipped to face the next week’s events. Joining dad in his Netflix marathon does not. Listing my tasks on Habitica is both enjoyable and fulfilling for me. Scrolling through my Facebook feed is neither.
This also doesn’t mean that I’m against rest. On the contrary, I think appropriately-scheduled recovery time is just what the body needs to get used to a certain pace of life. It’s just that the pace my life is at right now is not adjusted to five all-work days and two no-work days. It’s running on about four hours of focus, then an hour of leisure, then two hours of focus, … — this happens no matter what day of the week it is. I know myself enough that if I veer away from this pace and break the cycle, it’s going to take a lot of energy to get back on track. Again, losing momentum.
The pace may be different from person to person. Perhaps your own personal pace does coincide with the weekday-weekend schedule. Perhaps you’re more productive with three weeks of straight work and one week spent floating around an island somewhere. I don’t want to antagonize weekends, but I do want to warn people about the trap of thinking that weekends exist for everyone.
Weekend mentality can trap us into guilt-tripping ourselves (and our peers) into activities that may not agree with the individual paces of our lives. Be careful not to dig and make that hole deeper; it’s one that we all have to crawl out of by Monday anyway.
