A rejuvenating weekend is key to a productive work/school week ahead.
Here are some tips to prepare for your weekends.
Check the weather; sunny weekends call for different plans than rainy ones.
Keep your partner or family members updated on your upcoming weekend plans at least two days ahead of the weekend and check in on their plans. I talk with my husband about the weekend on Wednesdays and let him know what I have in mind or already planned. If I have a morning of appointments or a night out with girlfriends planned out, he will make plans too. The same goes the other way around.
If you’re in the mood to go out somewhere nice as a couple, explicitly ask your partner and not leave it to chance.
Check IMDb ratings before watching a movie to have a pleasant movie night experience.
Check the expected homework load for the kids, which could impact family outings. In our household, we try to do most of the homework on weekends to have more leisurely evenings on school nights.
As much as possible, run your errands and appointments and shop for groceries on weekends, preferably in the morning. This way, you’ll get done faster and relieve yourself from wasting precious evenings during the workweek.
Make sure visiting your parents, if geographically possible, is accounted for in your weekend plans.
Weekends constitute 29% of your week. A well-spent weekend can renew your family bonds and help you make significant progress in your personal or home projects.
Coming from an Industrial Engineering background and an excellent experience in Six Sigma projects, I like to catch defects in processes and improve them. Likewise, I enjoy noticing friction points in my day-day life and solving them. Studying and teaching Atomic Habits, in my podcast and videos lately, helped me hone this skill even better.
Here are some examples of solutions I implemented to friction points I had personally faced:
Friction Point
Solution
I want to walk during working hours, but I wear heels.
Bring running shoes with me and use them in breaks.
Nobody wears running shoes at work; it will be weird.
Get comfortable all-black shoes suitable for walking and work like this one, keep them at work, and put them on for walks (my accountability partner’s suggestion). Or get over myself and the discomfort, maybe soon.
Not listening to podcasts on my new Airpods while taking a walk because I’m used to Bluetooth neckband headsets and fear Airpods would fall out.
Use a cheap Bluetooth headset for walks.
Getting hungry at work, eating unhealthy food, and the hassle of ordering the food.
If I’m ordering food from a small place nearby, I don’t like thinking about what to eat, making the call to order it, or paying cash on delivery.
If I’m ordering from an app, I don’t enjoy browsing to decide my meal, verifying my credit card using a one-time password, getting contacted by the delivery man to double-check the address, or receiving my meal at varying times.
Bring a lunch box of fruits and veggies to feel less hungry.
Automate the food ordering process by subscribing to a healthy meals delivery service where I pay monthly, order weekly, and get contacted by the driver daily at about the same time to receive my meal.
Feeling sleepy and craving coffee after lunch, ordering coffee hassle, my favorite coffee not nearby.
I magically found this instant drip coffee option from one of my favorite coffee places. I buy a box of 10 packets every two weeks.
A 90-minute weekend class for my daughter, and the location is not near enough to return home.
Prepare a list of errands to cross off during the class or take a walk in the nearby area.
Looking for stuff around the house, losing stuff, getting late asking about stuff.
Have less stuff, less clothes, less socks, less toys and less paper. To do that, I need to turn decluttering into a habit, not a yearly project, which is my current focus.
Did this list remind you of solutions you too can take action on?
Many times, the reason you are not committing to your habits is not that you’re not disciplined enough or too lazy. Instead, the habit is not easy enough, and that’s perfectly okay.
Embrace this simple law of habit change; make it easy. You are not too high-maintenance if you remove friction points. On the contrary, you are re-engineering your environment to improve your life.
As James Clear says:
The less friction you face, the easier it is for your stronger self to emerge. The idea behind make it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.
My friend is starting a new job soon, so I sent her this list of helpful reminders; maybe they will help you too:
Starting a new job is uncomfortable; you are used to being the expert in your previous job, but now you will be the newbie. Not knowing all the answers is uncomfortable.
Sit with the discomfort and accept it, realizing it is a temporary phase.
Those first weeks are your golden opportunity to ask questions. You are expected to. Your new team will not look to you for answers for a while. Don’t act as if you have them; you don’t.
It’s time to practice listening and hold off jumping to conclusions. Just listen.
Set clear boundaries about what’s OK and what’s not OK, especially jokes and personal questions.
Some employees will try to win you from day one. It’s nice to feel welcomed, but they are not your friends yet, let time show you who they are.
Some employees will try to plant seeds about other employees. Please don’t take their word for it. Even if they trust or like another employee, that does not mean you should too. Let your own experience determine your relationships.
Some employees would be so insecure that they will see you as a threat and try to sabotage you, keep your eyes open, and listen more than you talk.
You have always said you want to leave work at work, so it’s time to walk the talk. Changing your job is a chance to change your work style. You may be used to taking work home and getting work done after your kids sleep, but people at your new job do not know that. The first step is to leave at 5 pm on day one, right when the official working hours end. You don’t stay late to prove anything to anyone. Instead, you become so efficient during working hours to shut down work entirely until the next day. If you stay late, on the other hand, you will set that as their normal expectations from you, while leaving at 5 pm would be abnormal.
Changing your environment is a great way to start new habits and get rid of negative ones. Try taking your lunch box instead of ordering takeout, bringing your coffee with you instead of buying it, taking walks during lunch breaks instead of staying glued to your screen, listening to a new podcast in your new route, or changing your attire or hairstyle.
This could be a wish list or simply a list of digital nagging tasks that I’m dumping here, maybe to say you are not alone thinking about them, or to get my affairs in order in power hour(s) as Gretchen Rubin says.
Spend time reading and enjoying all my email newsletters with no guilt
Unsubscribe from content I don’t read or enjoy or open.
Clean up my following lists on Instagram and Twitter
Upload all my mobile photos and fix that recent memory issue in my phone.
Go through all items in my downloads folder and order them properly
Go through documents in my OneDrive and clear it up.
Read all my Kindle books and listen to all my audible books, or simply make peace with the idea that I will never read some of these books after all, as long as I am always interested in new books.
GTD old tasks on my favorite to-do app Any.do, delete irrelevant tasks, and really decide the next action for each task that I decide to keep.
I found that most of these tasks can’t be done on phone. Unless apps are properly locked, we can get easily distracted and forget the original task we started. Moreover, no matter the phone model, phone screens are too small for focus. That’s why we rarely send important emails on phones.
For these tasks to happen, I need to dedicate some time for them. Maybe none of them will directly move my goals forward, I even could be using them as means of productive procrastination on my most meaningful goals.
On the other hand, getting through them would enhance my feeling of clarity, I will have easier and more searchable digital life, in addition to making sure that the important is distinctly saved from memory fading or trash.
Working in a monthly-sales-target environment makes me even more aware of the beginnings and ends of months. Since last year, I got used to resetting myself every month by doing the monthly review exercise in which I reflect on the wins, lessons learned and goals progress during the past month, and also plan for the month ahead by adding important dates on calendar, scheduling some events and online content like my podcast episodes.
Today marks the beginning of a new quarter of the year, which gets me to another whole level of reviews. I love doing the quarterly reviews, and as I concluded before in April, I will take 2 weeks to do it properly and reset my goals for the coming 90 days. This is the way I believe each quarter should start.
Since it’s the mid-year mark too, I may need to re-visit some of the things that inspired me at the beginning of the year like my mantra of the year which is Practice Focused Attention.
Also, July is my birthday month, which means fun ahead, especially that many family members and friends are visiting for the first time in 2 years with the pandemic finally withdrawing.
I used to buy online courses in July that I didn’t finish, and thus developed a limiting belief for a while that “I don’t finish what I start”, only to realize later that it was not about me but the timing of those courses with respect to my life. It was simply not the right season. Therefore, I vowed not to create audacious goals for July anymore and just enjoy the flow of summer and the heightened social life that will be temporary up until most people travel back before schools start.
In order to honor this special month, I made 2 lists, let go list and keep list.
In July I want to let go of…
Waking up at 5AM because I will be staying up late most days.
Regular posting on Instagram (apart from stories), I will take a break.
Digital Rules: I will not apply strict mode when using social media this month. Most of my digital rules became habits anyway, like no Instagram before I leave the house in the morning.
In July I will keep…
15-minute morning meditation.
Daily one-sentence journal for my kids (I don’t like to see empty pages).
Five-minute gratitude journal.
Food journaling (I did not commit well in June).
Weekly 5-minute podcast episodes and of course newsletter.
Keep writing here at least 5 days a week. (Break in case of traveling only)read the update below
Doing less is a challenge for me. There are many items popping up in my head to add to the Keep List, however those are the only ones I want to track daily/weekly and the compass to a successful July.
It’s July 7th, and after reading the below email from Leo Babuta I felt this is exactly what I need. Therefore, I changed the point above about writing daily here. I am taking this month off. Anything I post would be a bonus.
I am still in the quarterly/birthday/mid-year reflective mode, plus summer fun family focused mode. Just to keep you in the picture, I am not taking off from everything, I still go to work every day.
See you soon.
Returning to Practices
I mentioned recently that I took the month of June off, and have just come back to work … what that means is restarting my regular routines & practices.
This has me reflecting on the act of re-starting something like a meditation practice, exercise routine, or work routine.
It can be tough for a lot of us when we get derailed and have to re-start. We can feel discouraged, because we have some idea that we should have not stopped or gotten interrupted, that something is wrong with us for not sticking to it (once again).
I say toss out that idea. It’s not so helpful.
Starting again is a part of the process. And the process is never over — you don’t form a habit or do a practice and then forget about it. You have to give it your focus, fully, and then give it your focus again when you get sidetracked. Just like returning to your breath in meditation after you’ve gotten distracted. Again and again, we come back.
Instead of thinking of it as a frustrating task to start again, we might think of it as returning home.
I wish you a continual returning home, for life. gratefully,
I am so impressed by the stories of Todd Parr that I got for my kids recently. They are so funny, meaningful, colorful. I even felt like hugging those brightly colored pages that my kids laughed with me/at me in amusement.
The latest book we read was called The Feel Good Book. We loved it so much that we kept naming things and moments that make us feel good long after finishing reading it.
This reminded me to share my feel-good list I made recently using my PowerSheets, appropriately called: “What Fires Me Up”.