Some calendars start on Mondays. Manic Mondays,the beginning of the work week, they start off entrenched in demands,ToDo lists and starting out 5 steps behind.
Other calendars start on Sundays, for some- a religious break- for others, sleep in late, hide-under-the-covers-and-dread-what’s-coming-tomorrow followed by hours of email catch up for work. In both of these cases, the end of the week starts on Friday night, as soon as work is done. Friday night is the beginning of the big blow off, steam venting, “recovery” period that is the week-end. Run errands, run kids, catch up on house work, Honey-do lists, “all the stuff I could not get done during the week.”
Lately, I have been approaching the calendar from a different perspective. I do not have weekends that last for days. Friday night is the end of my week- a true WeekEnd. Yep, a lot of times, Friday night is a blow off and vent night. But when the night is over, so is the week.
The first day of my mental week is on Saturday. This gives me two full days to spend getting prepared for all the demands that the world and my family are going to impose come Monday morning. I do not spend my Saturday and Sunday recovering from the week, or digging out from everything that got piled on me. I spend my Saturday and Sunday examining what my upcoming week requires and preparing for it.
I should be clear that, much to my children’s regret, there is still a lot of house cleaning going on here on the weekends. This does not transform my life into something mystical or superior. But when I am cleaning, I am not cleaning up the messes from the previous week- I am organizing and preparing for the tasks in the week ahead. When I sit down and go over email or schedules, I am not making lists of the forgotten or missed, I am not picking up lost pieces, I am preparing for the meetings and deadlines in the coming week.
Yes, it all sounds like semantic word games. But there is a Jedi mind trick at work here. When you spend the first two days of your week with time to prepare, time to sleep in, or time to spend with family first- those Mondays start to look entirely different .
Now, if I could just get Google to offer Saturday as an option for starting my week…..
