Quiet Weekends Could Be Your Answer for Better Work-Life Balance

I love the idea of a quiet weekend. Waking up naturally without the alarm. Spending time in the shower, enjoying a nice warm bath while my coffee brews in the background. Or maybe a brunch at my favourite café and visiting the market to pick up a few essentials for dinner later. Or not.

You see, that’s exactly what a quiet weekend should be like – to do things at your own pace. After a long week of working, we often feel like we need to make up for lost time over the weekend. Hence why many of us pack our weekends with runs and hikes way too early in the morning, catching up with friends over lunch, tea, and dinner, hitting the latest mall or latest restaurant only to be caught in human traffic… sounds familiar?

We don’t blame you if this is your weekend. When you’ve been hustling Monday to Friday, it’s easy to feel like you need to “own” your weekend before 9am Monday blues roll by again!

But here’s where trying to pack your weekend with things to do and people to see could go wrong for you and your career: According to experts, we’re trying too hard to “live for the weekend” to compensate for the insane amount of hours we spend trying to make it work. So much so that work often comes home with us at night so there’s hardly any time to do the things we enjoy at our own pace. Our weeks are filled with so many responsibilities and deadlines that we try our best to cram in as much fun and activities as we can on Saturday and Sunday.

The problem with that? Feeling tired, zonked out, and low energy on Sunday night that our weekends aren’t exactly recharging us for Monday; it’s making us feel burnout instead!

Enter the quiet weekend, the beauty of stillness and self-indulgence without feeling the need to catch up or do things. The idea is to aim for a calmer, quieter weekend so you make the most of your time off work to recuperate and recharge. Instead of wanting to do it all, quiet weekends are all about doing nothing at all. This way, you spend less energy on activities and focus more on relaxing and giving your body – and brain! – that much needed rest so by Monday you’ll feel more energised to take on the week’s responsibilities.

How does it work? Well, according to the person who coined it, Jill Cotton, it involves working really hard at the beginning of week, tapering down by Friday with a lighter workload so that you can immediately start to unwind when you clock out for the weekend. When you slow down towards the weekend, you are putting yourself in a better position to enjoy the quiet weekend ahead. Doing this will help with your work-life balance as you feel less exhausted at the end of the week. Your personal time is also more in your control, without you feeling all sorts of anxiety that your personal weekend is slipping away.

If anything, one of the most important reasons to take a quiet weekend is simply that it gives you the chance to relax. Having a weekend with no major plans or activities allows you to get enough sleep and rest. And this can make all the difference at work between feeling super tired on Monday morning or being recharged instead. Sure, you still want to meet up with some friends so learn to space out your social activities instead of trying to cram everything in. This way, you’ll appreciate your weekends even more as the precious two days become more sacred to you!

Go on – have a lazy weekend this Saturday. No alarms, just waking up naturally. Mooch around. No plans. Just chill. We’re willing to bet that you’ll want all your weekends to be quiet, lazy, and relaxed from now on!

Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash.