Years ago, I used to have what I guess the kids these days are calling the “Sunday scarries”. That horrible moment sometime too early into a Sunday where you remember you need to work tomorrow and start cogitating on the problems you left mid-stream when you stopped working on Friday afternoon. Sometimes it would push me to check email and get responses out, or, worse, to start working on whatever I was in the middle of. On Sunday. Which means your weekend is less than it should be. The break is smaller.

Oddly for me, Covid was the thing that finally helped me banish non-deliberate weekend working. What I mean by that is that occasionally, but rarely, I do have a super urgent project that makes me need to work the weekend. But other than those random, urgent things, it’s just “work”. And “work” gets done during work time. (Sidenote – if work is so enormous that to get everything done on time, regularly, the company is understaffed. I don’t work weekends because my company doesn’t appropriately hire.) The need to find a way to clearly separate work from non-work when I started working from home during covid has turned into the gift that keeps on giving.’

I no longer have notifications turned on my mail app on my phone. I don’t need to see the number of unread emails I have. I no longer feel compelled to check my phone a few times a weekend or after I log off at night. On vacation, I put all of the apps on my phone related to work in a folder inside a folder. And I don’t touch them. I tell my boss if something is urgent while I’m on vacation, text me  because I won’t be checking emails. I also do all of it without feeling defensive. That was a LONG TIME coming on the learning curve.

The long covid memory issues I can also recognize, for this one purpose, are a gift – if i’m not reviewing my notes or looking at something to trigger my memory, I have to put a lot of effort into trying to remember what I was working on Friday afternoon or what I put on my todo list for Monday. So I just don’t put effort into it.

The net result is that my weekend feel… like weekends. Like 2 days and 3 nights of “not work”. Of time to play, time to adult if needed, and time to just enjoy myself and whatever sounds interesting to do. A lot of other things have come together to seriously diminish “have to’s” on weekends too. Kiddo is in college, so I don’t have kid events to schedule around. I also am privileged to work from home fulltime, so I don’t need to meal prep the week’s lunches. I don’t even have to go grocery shopping on the weekends if I don’t want to. And I often strategically wait to do it on a Monday or Tuesday night when it’s not busy. In fact, most of the adulting I have to do, I shop for on the week nights. 

This weekend, I’ve read, played some games, knit, gone to the beach, celebrated kiddo coming back from her summer job, had a Sunday morning drive for pastries and coffee, and gone on a tour of a local estate/view/thing. I did a little cleaning and laundry. I’ll take the garbage out. But that’s sort of the limit of my adulting this weekend. It doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s sort of glorious.