Skip to main content

Weekend Do-over

A friend shared this on social media.


My first reaction was "of course you can". I do that every weekend. I work Wednesday to Friday. So Monday and Tuesday are my 'second weekend'.

Sadly though, not all employers offer 3-day-a-week jobs. And it is sad.

Sub-consciously we realise that we are spending a lot of time working and not so much time enjoying the benefits of that work.

As a result we start to resent the work that we do (even though it's our chosen line of work) because it takes up so much of our time.

Sometimes the standard weekend is barely enough to recuperate from a stressful week and catch up on household chores and then it's back to work again.

We hunger for more time to actually live life and enjoy it.

So how can we do it?

1. Hope that employers realise this great opportunity. Offering a diversity of work options can help them compete for the best employees. Working 3 days per week is also more productive.

2. Team up. Where I used to work there was a pair of people who actually applied for their job as a pair - each working 2.5 days per week. Again this relies on the employer being smart enough to realise that they are getting two brains for the price of one.

3. Take breaks between jobs. If we're in the position to do so, sometimes a break between jobs (kind of like a mini-gap year) can be a good opportunity to escape the grind and enjoy life. So many of us don't use up our annual leave. That pay-out can help you have some time-off at the end.

4. Set your own hours. If you're self-employed you can sometimes set your own hours. A tradesman was recently telling me how he moved to four days per week to spend more time at home with his kids.

5. Be more selective with spending our money. Most of these options also mean getting by on less income than before. But do we really need that much money for a good life? That's a question worth asking.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

5 Reasons why we hoard - and they're wrong

"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa...

20 unplugged ideas

May 1-7 is Screen-Free Week . It's about spending time away from the screen and more time with each other - or doing things we love. It's a great chance to break the work-tired-watchTV-ads-shop-work cycle. This list of twenty alternative ideas is great for screen-free week. It's also a great reminder of things we could enjoy if we're shopping and spending less - and maybe working less and enjoying life more.

Will robots take your job?

The future could be very different. It's one reason I started this blog. What will technology mean for jobs? For incomes? For society? So I was excited to find Will Robots Take Your Job? at my local library. What does the book say? There's always been technological change and we've always found jobs. As the more laborious jobs were taken by machines, we took on higher skilled jobs, moving further up the "skill ladder". The main question is whether this time is different. Will the "skill ladder" continue to have higher rungs for humans to move on to? Will these rungs appear as quickly as the current rungs disappear? Either way we're headed for significant disruption. Either large-scale re-training of our workforce or massive unemployment. The author despairs that our leaders seem not to talk about this - and worse still, not have a plan for it. Farmers or horses? In 1870 about 75% of Americans worked in agriculture and used 25 million hors...