Using the Weekend to Springboard into a Successful Week

You’ve just finished a relaxing weekend– maybe you binge-watched a new show on Netflix, maybe you caught up with a few friends– but now Monday has returned and you somehow feel a bit anxious despite your best efforts to recuperate over Saturday and Sunday. How can this be? The solution to starting the week off on the right foot is really very simple: preparation. In addition to using the weekend to relax, it is the time to prepare for the week ahead in an attempt to limit the various tasks one must juggle and complete during the week. In her article “Smart Weekend Rituals to Make Your Workweek Less Anxious” Jane Burnett describes a few easy tricks to make the most of your weekend so you can rest easy and stay focused during the workweek.

Here are a few of our favorite tips:

• Prepare meals ahead of time. In addition to guiding your grocery list at the store cutting down on meal-prep time during the week, planning one’s meals is a healthy way to control what and how one eats.
• Care for your living space. There’s nothing worse than coming home after a busy Monday to a messy, cluttered home than only manages to mirror your mental state and makes you wonder why you didn’t clean anything over the weekend. Cleaning and tidying over the weekend makes for one less thing you have to worry about during the week.
• Don’t obsess over past weeks’ faux pas. Continuing to think about all the things that went wrong in a previous week weighs down the mind and prevents one from focusing on the week ahead. As Burnett notes, “the more we think about something, the more we attract the emotions around it into our minds and our lives. So if you’re dwelling on negative emotions, you’ll feel even more negative emotions.”

Photo: “99/365: Relax” by Andres Nieto Porras, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.