What happened when I took a weekend off work
No deals fell through, no sites failed and there is no reason to work weekends again.
The problem with not having a boss is there is no-one to tell you to go home or stop working. There is no Friday ritual of celebrating with co-workers the end of the week. The week and the work never ends.
Indeed, the opposite is true. We have hustle culture. Everyone else is working evenings and weekend so you feel like you should as well. Humans mirror humans. So if everyone in your tribe does something, you do it too.
Instead of logging into Twitter continously on the weekend, here are some things I did instead:
- I caught up with an old friend and went for a great walk
- I tidied my apartment from top to bottom
- I started reading Thinking Fast and Slow
- I bought an actual newspaper and read it in the park
The best part was I just felt incredibly free. I felt like I had loads and loads of time for a change.
I was thinking about this today- what would I normally achieve by working a weekend any way?
- I'm not going to close any bootcamp sponsors because they are shut over the weekend
- I can sell newsletter sponsorships during week days and respect other people's weekends (they might also not be working)
- Ghost support doesn't operate at the weekend so I can't make changes to my site and then ask them if I need help
- Twitter is quiet at the weekend so doesn't make sense to post lots of my content then
Really, there's nothing critical that I can achieve at the weekend.
For sure there is fine-tuning I could do. I could find more interviewees. I could work on SEO or listen to podcasts.
Really though unless you are trying to make a billion dollar company and you need to be number 1 in your sector, I don't think you need to work weekends.
Most of us are indie entrepreneurs because we want independence and to choose a better work/life balance. It doesn't really make sense therefore to do that and then sacrifice other parts of your life. If I'm going all in on my work then other parts of my life like my social life, my reading, my fitness are correspondingly going to suffer as well.
I feel as well that when I take the whole weekend off by Monday I am racing to get started again. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. If work is around all the time you can get bored or worse, burn out completely. So I think having days of zero work each week means you are excited to get going again during the week.
So I'm going to push more of my social activities to the weekend and try to create more of fixed line between work and play. Hopefully this means I enjoy my work and play more!