It’s Saturday morning, the official start of the weekend, I’m standing in the middle of my kitchen after breakfast, and there’s mess everywhere I look…Sink filled with dishes, check! Laundry basket making faces at me with the overflowing bed sheets from last week, check! Kids turned the TV Room into a toy zone, check! And all I want to do is curl up on the couch with a good book and watch something I actually don’t have to use my neurons for…
If you’re smiling as you’re reading this, you may have recognized a common feeling among working moms (sorry when it comes to chores, working moms win the war) everywhere, aka the Dread of the Weekend Shift. You know it, it’s that tightness in your chest as you think about just how much you have to do to catch up on your chores at home. And the mounting frustration as you realize it’s actually the week-end, and you’re supposed not to work…And if you add to that Junior’s soccer game, Dear Daughter’s piano recital, and “getting your hair did”, it’s a wrap…You might as well lay right there on the floor and pray for some miracle, or Haagen Dazs sea salt caramel ice cream…
There’s just that point when you hit the weekend shift wall, and you can no longer accept to work at work, work at home, and work everywhere in between. It’s time to reclaim your weekends, and achieve some sense of balance in between all the to-do’s will-never-be-done, and why-is-laundy-never-ending’s…
After much resistance and not enough ice cream to drown my weekend shift sorrows, here are some drastic changes I had to make to regain whatever shred of sanity I had left, and be able to read a page or two, or sit down somewhere for a minute or two. And I mean, if you’re into coming from work on Fridays and spending the rest of the weekend cleaning up, tidying up and cooking up, by all means, I’m your biggest fan. But for the rest of us who can actually honestly admit we hate laundry and would like to take a nap once every couple of years, there may be a few adjustments we can make to replace the weekend shift with actual weekend fun.
Spend less on stuff, and more on help.
For me, it means staying away from any shoe store, shoe expo, shoe displays, shoe anything...
And actually reading the pile of unread books I have at home, prior to destroying my bank account on Amazon just because I signed up for Amazon Prime and shipping is free… In other words, I had to put myself on a tight budget so I could replace all my spur-of-the-moment, ooh-that-looks-nice-and-I-might-need-it-some-day impulse purchases with actual help.
So I saved the money and hired someone to help me with cleaning the house and doing chores. I have to say it was a BIG mindset change for me, for two reasons. One, I thought I didn’t need to pay someone for something I could do myself. Two, I could do it myself and save the money to go buy stuff I didn’t really need. Typical case of the chicken and egg…
Which brings me to my next point.
Learn to value your time.
I mean, really value it, not just in terms of what you can and cannot do. But in terms of what it costs for someone like you to do thing A instead of doing thing B. Let me explain…
If you’re making $75,000 a year net, and you take that $75K a year, and actually divide it into 52 weeks of work, you get $1,442 and change a week. Then you go a step further, and divide this by 40 hours of work, and get about $36 and change a week. So literally, that’s how much an hour of your work is worth, if you were to pay yourself…And I’m not including how much it cost for you to get that college education (hello student loans)…
Now I ain’t trying to take us back to basic maths (don’t nobody wanna go back that far or deep or wide for that matter), but think about it. If you were to pay yourself $36 an hour to clean your house, how much more beneficial to you would it be to pay someone $10 or $15 an hour to do the same? Actually, they might do it better and faster, just for the sheer reason they wouldn’t be checking their Instagram every other minute and texting with the girls every so often…Just sayin’…
If you look at your time with the perspective of how much value it has, then you’re able to gain a new perspective. Not to mention forgive yourself for not doing it all…
Leverage the time and money you save.
If you had 5 hours to spend whichever way you’d like, what is the best thing you’d do for yourself? Is it read a book, enroll in a new class, go to the spa, or spend time with the people you love? Whatever your answer to this question, it brings us back to how we can best leverage our time and money. Especially our time, which as age (what’s that?) creeps up and you start realizing there’s not as much time left as before, becomes our most precious commodity…
Think of the time and money you could save by enlisting some help, even if you have to pay for it. And think about what you could actually produce with this time, in terms of precious memories, new ventures, exciting opportunities, etc…
You could write that great novel, take the kids to visit family you haven’t seen in a while, or just take a bath alone for like, a half hour, by yourself…You could build that business you’ve been talking about, or find time to meditate, or entertain that hobby that relaxes you so much you don’t feel the need to yell at the hubby so often (I know none of you do that)…Or you could just cry “Freedom”!
In Conclusion
It took some time to adjust my mindset from a production-based frame to a value-based one. And to understand that what’s important to me may not be as important to someone else, but that at the end of the day, it’s my responsibility to live my life to the fullest, and enjoy every bit of time I have while I’m still breathing (and avoiding wrinkles and ashy elbows in the process)…
On this note, dear Weekend Shift, you are officially fired. Dear Weekend, welcome back into my life!
Have you reclaimed your weekends yet?
Love,
The Corporate Sis.
