Weekend Equivalency-speak
… weekend output will stun you
Monday Oct. 21, 2019
Monday, Oct. 21, 2019
Am I advocating a seven (7) day work week?
No.
We are already there.
It may not be everyone. Ask around – query your friends, your family – ask them if they park their devices and briefcases at 5 PM daily, if they never touch them on weekends.
You will learn, in almost everyone’s case, we are working evenings and weekends – so rather than deny that reality, embracing it has taken up residence in our lives, not just as an ‘OMG – we have a deadline looming’ strategy.
However, as a more deliberate planning and execution process for projects, we never seem to have the quiet brain time to execute.
I spent a full weekend recently ‘working on projects.’
That’s what I said when I chose to avoid socializing, deciding instead to focus my leisure time on work I lacked adequate time for during the week – and too often on the ‘I will do that on the weekend’ pile becomes overwhelming.
I’ve found that weekends in the solitude work wonders – partly for the output, for what gets done, but also for the other things that get done, fresh ideas, re-hashing old ideas, and possibilities that pop out of ‘working on projects.’
Or was it that I didn’t want to go?
I told myself that the work was more important than the play-time. I was a diplomat, and I made an excuse – because it saved the time of explaining and arguing this point. It was easier to decline graciously.
But, we should not dodge this reality – re-working our work to suit our best ways to get things done well ought to be in some ‘best practices’ manuals somewhere!
And I worked all weekend. I did tons of things I’d planned, tons I’d not anticipated. OK, not tons in terms of actual weight, but you get my meaning: LOTS.
For Monday morning arrival – all the requisite and routine to start the week, to start my Monday, but what about all the work not done on the weekend? Were those things not supposed to be done as part of ‘working no projects?’ Sure they were, but some things took longer than I expected.
Some new ideas came into my view, my frontal lobe, and I got distracted – I altered my focus to do some things which were tons of fun. So which ones was I avoiding? Ones that take more time – ones you can only effectively attack on the weekend.
Sure, weekends are for play; we all need that in equivalency-speak for a full life, but when we use them as a tool to avoid the work, avoid the work we can’t tackle during the week. These are important – half-measure will not do. Sometimes, a solitary weekend is the tool to use.
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