WEEKEND, INTERRUPTED

It’s Sunday

What time does your anxiety start? You likely know what I’m talking about

You’ve had a great weekend

Time spent with family, friends, doing things you love with people you love

Then suddenly a thought enters your mind

I need to write that email

I have to finish that slide

I better catch up on that report before tomorrow

Suddenly you’re no longer present in the activities you were doing

It’s not Monday yet

But you feel like you’d better get ready for it

They call it the Sunday Scaries

I call it Weekend, Interrupted

Look around at your peers, your friends, your bosses

Many people feel it, but few talk about it

If you experience this, you can overcome it

Here are 3 approaches you can take

I’ve tried them all and the third one helped me get my weekends back

🗂️ #1 NEVER TURN OFF

If you don’t stop working, you won’t have Weekend, Interrupted

Work on Saturday and Sunday and you won’t have worry about Monday because you work everyday

If you’re a founder taking a company from 0 to 1 to 3, this is your life

If you’re a CEO, maybe you never really turn off

If you’re a consultant, you may be traveling on Sundays, working on decks, it never stops

You may just love your work, have a ferocious work ethic, and think about it during every waking hour

I don’t recommend this approach, certainly not for very long

You will burn out and begin to resent your work

You will be living to work, you won’t ever really be present, and you will miss important events in the lives of people you care about

I’ve been there, unfortunately, for longer than I care to admit

In the golden years of your life, you won’t remember that great presentation you made to the Board of Directors

But you’ll remember celebrating your kid’s first birthday and your best friend’s wedding

🆕 #2 CHANGE YOUR JOB

If you go deep, you may realize that the reason for Weekend, Interrupted is this

Unless you work for Nvidia, Goldman Sachs, or SpaceX and you signed up for this life

You may be working for the wrong boss or the wrong company

They ask you for things “first thing Monday”

They expect a response to emails within 1 hour, weekends included

Or create fire drills so that you can never get caught up on your day job

Your approach to work and their approach to work may not be in alignment

They are stealing your time, your most precious asset

Sure there are cycles where the work exceeds the capacity of your workweek

This shouldn’t be the norm

If it is, think long and hard about why you’re doing the work you do at the place you are doing it

If it doesn’t match your expectations and honest conversations with your leaders don’t give you confidence that things will change

It’s time to move on

🔧 #3 FIX IT

Weekend, Interrupted is a reaction to something

How you react to things is in your control

For me, the cause was this- working in the retail industry, I and my teams had to make business decisions on Monday

Every Monday, we’re in reaction mode based on data from the sales reports

I realized that was never going to change, you’ll always want the most recent information for business decisions

But two things helped me get my weekends back

The first thing was to create a plan, a playbook, that contemplates different results

If you miss plan, make plan, or exceed it, what’s the tactic, the action?

If you know that ahead of time, then you save time and stress when it actually happens

The second thing is I learned what I call Insight Compression

Decisions are based on insights, feedback, and data

I learned to get to these quickly using only the most important factors, the ones that make a difference

It’s easy to get deep into the weeds of information, especially with today’s robust reporting tools

But only a few factors matter. I focus on these things to make decision

This takes practice, like anything, you get better and faster the more you do it

But it helped me do this on Monday instead of Sunday

So that I could focus on what I’d rather be doing on Sunday

I took my weekends back

You can, too