Parents — Reclaim Your Weekend. Here’s How.
Tournaments, parties, and house chores. When are parents supposed to rest?
Weekends kind of suck, don’t they?
As a parent, you work five days straight, dedicating 40 hours to your employer, a couple more to your commute, 36 hours to sleep, and a few to meal prep. Sprinkle in homework help, after-school activities, and a last-minute trip to the grocery store because the bok-choy you bought wasn’t nearly enough for the dinner you planned and a nice 48-hour break sounds just like what the doctor ordered.
Except for Saturday, there’s a baseball tournament, and your kid’s classmate has a birthday party on Sunday. You’ve got to run to Target to pick up a present, and oh yeah, we’ve got to grocery shop.
But we can’t grocery shop because we haven’t meal planned, but when we do meal plan, when will we have time to grocery shop?
Oh, and remember that brand-new washer and dryer you just purchased? Well, it’s not working right, and somebody’s got to look at it.
Before you know it, it’s Sunday night, the Sunday scaries are kicking in, and you have no idea when true rest will come your way.
I’ve been there.
It can seem like a never-ending cycle of pure insanity, unable to jump off the gerbil track and catch your breath for even one second.
Our inability to slow down is one of the reasons Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy has released an advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents in America.
It’s not even our fault. For most people, there is literally no other option but to grind your way through parenthood. It’s how society has been set up.
Yes, society should be built for parents. Every person on earth has parents, which is why I find it so wild that we need to mute our parenting to make progress in the workplace.
But no matter what I think society should look like, the five-day workweek still reigns large, and parenting plays second fiddle to profits.
Not in this house.
Little by little, we can work on society and make gradual changes over time, but we can change within our four walls starting Saturday.
Use your PTO.
In 2018, Americans left 768 million days of PTO on the table. Out of that, 236 million were forfeited completely.
Listen to me clearly; we cannot give our employers 236 million days of our time.
Paid time off is among the benefits we’ve earned as employees, and that time should be spent doing anything but work.
I’ve worked in HR for well over a decade. Let me be the first to say this advice is easier said than done.
I know there are managers who make life hell for employees who use their benefits. I know there are HR leaders who love nothing more than to write policies that look great on paper and look the other way when culture takes a toxic turn.
Nobody is going to have your back like you do. Use your PTO to
Get a haircut
Catch up on a book
Sleep
Play pickleball with a bunch of retired folks
Work on a side hustle
You don’t have to use your PTO solely for vacations. We all know vacations with kids are trips, and trips are fun but certainly not relaxing.
“Ryan, I saw you requested PTO for next Friday. Do you need to be off that day?”
Do I need to be? No. Will I be off? Yes.
I’ll be taking no further questions at this time.
Just say no.
I used to say yes to everything.
At church, I rarely turned down an opportunity to serve.
“Do you want to host a small group?”
Yes.
“Do you want to make announcements from the stage?”
Yes.
“Do you want to volunteer Thursday night?”
Yes.
People wanted my help, and being wanted felt great, but when COVID-19 paused our church attendance, my wife and I looked around and thought, “Is this what it’s like to have free time?”
It felt marvelous!
You don’t have to go to every birthday party. You don’t have to volunteer for everything, even if they’re in a tough spot.
If you have the margin to participate, use it by all means, but if you’re at your participation capacity, give yourself a rest.
Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
Let yourself be lazy.
Our family returned from a great but long trip to Wisconsin a few weeks back. It was Monday morning, and I was tired but someone needed to grocery shop and that someone was me.
I looked at the kids playing with their toys, peacefully, and I contemplated getting myself and the two kids dressed and ready to grocery shop.
Then, I entered items into my Sprouts App grocery list, saw the “Order for pick up” option, and hit it. I let somebody else walk around that store and pick up my groceries. We spent an extra two hours in our pajamas and played board games.
Maybe it’s a meal kit instead of shopping and cooking from scratch. Maybe it’s a virtual doctor's appointment instead of spending your Saturday morning in a doctor’s office. There is margin we can create in our week that will give us pieces of our weekend back.
Schedule rest.
You schedule play dates and tournaments, dinners, and date nights.
Have you ever scheduled a nap?
I’m serious. Have you ever booked an appointment on your own calendar, blocking two hours of your afternoon for a nap?
No?
You should!
I know weekends are for being productive, but a reset from time to time is incredibly productive.
There are no trophies for “Best Burnout.”
Weekends kind of suck, but they don’t have to. We place insane expectations on ourselves to cram as much into our 48 hours as possible, then walk into our weeks like, “Why am I still tired?”
Like everything in life, there’s balance. Maybe the washer needs to be fixed this weekend, but the light fixture could be replaced later.
Be a weekend warrior if you’d like to. Completing task after task in a 48-hour span comes with many benefits — but so does sleeping in and watching a movie on a Saturday afternoon.