One Small Friday Habit That Lets Me Actually Relax All Weekend
Photo by Rob Mulally on Unsplash
The Sunday Scaries.
You’ve heard of them. Heck, you probably have them!
(But if you haven’t, well, the “Sunday Scaries” is the term for that ball of anxiety in the back of your head come Sunday night when you start to worry about next week, and everything that’s on your plate, and then you don’t get to actually enjoy your Sunday evening because you’re too anxious about the week ahead.)
But did you know that there’s a surefire way to banish them for good?
Seriously, there is!
In order to make the “Sunday Scaries” a distant memory, there’s a simple practice you can put in place this week.
It starts on Friday and it’s called “End of Week planning”.
But before I get into HOW to do it, I want to share with you WHY it works.
End of Week planning has 2 primary benefits:
Once you’ve done it, you have a plan for the next week, and it’ll be much easier to mentally disconnect from work and actually enjoy the weekend.
On Monday, you get to start in “execution mode” because you already know exactly what you need to do (vs. sitting at your laptop trying to figure out where to start, or worse, starting with email and never quite making it out of your inbox).
Now that you know why this practice works, let’s talk about how to do it:
First, you’re going to open your task list/app and your calendar side by side.
Then, you’re going to take a look at your schedule for next week, and you’re going to assign yourself work based on the time you have available next week.
Bonus points for time-blocking the work.
Essentially, you want to make sure that, if you have a day of back-to-back meetings, well, you’re not expecting yourself to make a ton of headway on that big project. And, if you’ve miraculously got a day with a few hours of blissfully unscheduled time, well, that’s when you want to plan to do that deep work.
As you’re going through your task system, you want to be ruthlessly realistic about what fits into next week, on each day. (Note: This will likely be a little uncomfortable. Or a lot. Because you’re going to experiment with accepting that you can’t do everything you want to in the limited time you have. But it’ll be worth it. Promise.)
And you’ll want to make sure you’re accounting for the time it takes to get all your “regular” stuff done, like, processing your email, Slack or Teams messages, etc., or any other standard tasks you do regularly.
And don’t forget you’re gonna need time to eat and pee!
Would it surprise you to know that End of Week planning is my absolute favorite thing to do every week?
(Probably not, you know by now what a huge nerd I am!)
Why is this my favorite task?
Because once I’m done with EOW planning, I know that I have a whole weekend to enjoy…without the specter of the “Sunday Scaries” looming.
As much as I love my job (and I really do!), I don’t have to think about it again until Monday.
I get to enjoy my weekend, guilt-free, knowing that everything in my task list has a next action date of Monday, or the future.
What do you say?
Are you willing to give End of Week planning a try?
And one last tip: don’t wait until 5pm Friday to do this. It’s the last thing you’ll want to do when you’re wiped from the week. Do it sometime Friday morning, or even Thursday afternoon. If you’re feeling inspired, go ahead, block the time right now and commit to testing this out this week.
