It’s too easy to let your precious leisure time slip away from you – weekends vanish in what feels like instants while Thursday afternoons stretch ahead you for what feel like weeks. You need to rediscover the art of enjoying weekends, so you can return to work refreshed and re-energised, with happy memories to look back on and sustain you through the week.
Do Something Different
Doing the same thing every weekend, however much you enjoy it, means all your days off start to blur into one. Eating the same food, walking the same routes, even playing the same games, can all pall. If there’s nothing to set one weekend apart from another, then they’ll start to feel shorter: the memories are less distinct.
Getting out of the house to do something new and different means making new memories: you pay attention more to new experiences, which means your subjective experience of time stretches and it feels like you get more out of the weekend. Whether you’re experimenting with new recipes, changing up your routine, or using you weekend to go on a trip to another part of the world, novelty with make your weekend seem longer and give you better memories to look back on!
Relax
The art of relaxation is one well worth rediscovering. Our culture is currently obsessed with the notion of productivity, and it’s hard to enjoy your time if you’re not ‘achieving’ something, even on your own time on a Sunday afternoon.
Try to get out of the rat race on the weekend. Slip on some slides footwear, kick back, and relax. Changing your clothes for less formal ones help to send a signal to your body that this is a different sort of day. It changes the way you walk, the way you hold yourself and helps you to truly relax so you can enjoy the sensation of being properly rested for a change.
Physical Work
In the majority of jobs in the current economy, it’s hard to point at the results of your day’s labour, which can make it hard to feel really satisfied with what you do. While a carpenter can spend a day working hard and sleep well knowing that there’s a whole chair in the world that wasn’t there this morning, it’s harder to make that connection in other jobs.
Why not spend some at the weekend doing some physical work you can be proud of? Whether it’s getting outside to work in the garden, baking or doing some DIY, creating something with your own hands is a good way to create some satisfaction in our diffuse and digital world.
