Ah- its the WEEKEND!!! A time to relax, do the things you want to do, and NOT WORK. I know this is hard, but I am a convert to the “not working on the weekends” crowd. I used to spend weekends interspersing checking and answering emails and trying to get “caught up” with family time and so-called relaxing. What I learned was that on Monday morning I was neither “caught up” nor “relaxed”. In fact, I was often more frazzled than when I walked in the door on Friday evening, so I changed some things, and I, my work, and my family are far better off for it. First, the things I’ve learned:

• The work will still be there on Monday. It’s not as if not working on the weekend will somehow remove your opportunity to pick up where you left off on Friday.

• “Caught up” is a myth. There is always something else I can do, and what I do is meet deadlines through careful planning, not through working on the weekends.

• There are no true emergencies in my job. I am not a firefighter, physician, or hostage negotiator. Honestly, nothing is truly an emergency.

• I will not be on my deathbed saying “I wish I’d spent more time in the lab/office.” Getting to the age where more and more of my friends are dying or becoming ill has been a real wake-up call for spending time with the people I love, who, frankly, are not at work.

So what do I do to create and maintain the sacredness of my weekend? Well, I’ve set and hold some very firm boundaries and have set some goals for my personal life just as I have for my professional life. Here are some suggestions that I’ve found helpful:

1. Simply do not do email or work phone calls in the evening or on weekends. Period. The trick here is to communicate this to the people you work with to manage their expectations, especially if this is a change. Just let people know that due to family or personal obligations, you are unavailable for email and phone calls after hours and on weekends.

2. Set goals in your personal life just like you do in your professional life. If you set a goal of completing a training or publishing a book or paper or getting a promotion at work, you plan for it and work for it, right? Do the same thing in your personal life. I set a goal of learning to play tennis, partly for exercise and social activities, and partly so I can play with my daughter. I’m taking steps to meet that goal just as I set and take steps to accomplish things at work.

3. Schedule dates with yourself and other people for non-work activities. Just as you make appointments for work items or events, create calendar entries for personal and family time and activities. Plans are easier to break in favor of work if you do not have an appointment or firm commitment- seeing the date on the calendar can help make the event real and harder to skip in favor of work.

4. Use technology boundaries to separate your work and your life. Maybe it would be helpful to create different computer, email, and instant messaging accounts for personal versus professional activities, as well as separate electronic and paper calendars.

5. Decide on what you will consistently say “no” to: Figure out what kinds of work activities that may cut into your “real life” are worth saying yes to and which ones you’ll say no to. For example, I do a number of invited speaking gigs, and although I am always glad to spend the whole day with the group who invited me, I always decline dinner invitations, as that is prime family/kid/homework time, and I need to be a Mom in the evenings. Likewise, I do a minimum of traveling, and am very careful to choose only conferences that are really worth it professionally; I say no to at least 80% of what I could go to or am invited to.

It was a little tough to commit to and set others’ expectations for these changes in my boundaries, but now that I’ve done it, I find that I return to work on Monday rested, more effective in taking on my work, relaxed, and fulfilled from spending some time with my family and myself. My tennis game still stinks, but that will get better.

As a coach I spend a great deal of time supporting clients in finding ways to establish and maintain balance and boundaries between their work and personal lives with varying degrees of success.  For some, it’s pretty simple:  Make appointments with yourself or your family and keep them just as you would with a client or a colleague.  For others, its harder:  Appointments get overridden all the time as things come up at work, there is that “one more email” that has to be answered, or a decision to work on a presentation blots out “me” time.  What’s the difference between these people?  Well, my own experience and my work as a coach has distilled it to one word:  GUILT. 

Somehow our society had grown to value work time and professional achievement  over personal time and recreation to the point that taking time to create balance between the seemingly-endless stream of work and our families creates immense internal turmoil for many folks.  We’ve internalized society’s bias that more work=better work (a flawed premise for many reasons) such that for some people, great time relaxing, hiking, reading, or playing with our friends and families is overshadowed by a cloud of guilt that “I *should* be working.”  How sad.

Of course, as is true of most of this blog, I’m writing about this because I’ve allowed myself to fall into this trap numerous times.  I distinctly remember a while back when I’d promised my daughter that we’d play Uno (she always beats me), “as soon as Mommy is done with this email.”  Well, the emails dragged on, and finally, she asked me if I was ever going to be done.  My initial reaction was a welling-up of frustration and anger with her impatience, but as I looked up at her, I saw that she had been waiting over an hour and also, that she was still waiting patiently.  As I looked at her, I also saw how grown up she’s becoming (even though she’s only 6) and suddenly I felt guilty for a different reason.  I shut down my email, closed my laptop, and she beat me.  Twice. 

What was the guilt?  Before I know it, she and her brother will be grown and out of the house and I’ll be left with all the time in the world to do my email on the weekends.  Thankfully, I’m paying enough attention to re-focus my weekend energy into these wonderful kids and my best friend, my husband, to honor the balance that we all need between the stress of the week (work, school, homework, driving, etc.) and “us” time.  Too soon, we’ll be sending them off to college and wishing for a game of Uno.

The appointments I make with my family and myself are non-negotiable, and have to be.  I am proud of the work I do, and I enjoy it, but it’s the relationships in our lives that really matter.  It makes more sense to feel guilt for not making time to be with the people we love than for not working through the weekend; the good news is that guilt usually tells us that something needs to change, and perhaps keeping those appointments with yourself, your family, and your freinds is the solution.