According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 30-35% of employees regularly work over the weekend. And that’s not because they have a side-hustle. Nearly one-third of all full-time employees with a single job work on Saturdays, Sundays or both.
More and more employees are kissing their weekends off goodbye, in favor of high job performance. But the catch-22 of working through the weekend is that allowing your work hours to bleed into downtime can negatively affect performance, rendering that extra effort moot.
Whether you are an employee working in a fast-paced corporate office or an entrepreneur carving out your own schedule, today’s American workforce culture is never to stop moving.
A 2017 survey by Enterprise Rent-A-Car reports that 67% of a sample of Americans aged 25 and older worked on the weekends. Research during the pandemic shows that this never-offline mindset negatively affects our productivity and quality of work.
With a combination of time management tools at the office and clear boundaries away from the office, you can maximize your productivity while allowing yourself to indulge in some much-needed downtime.
Set Yourself up for Success During The Work Week
Identify Your Limits
There are only so many hours in a day. Determine what your upper limit is for work capacity before you carve out your schedule for the week.
When are you most productive during the day. if you’re not sure, take a day or two and keep a log of what you did and when. It’ll become pretty obvious. If you’re a morning person, eat that frog! If you’re more of an afternoon person, schedule your meetings first and your Deep Work time later.
Schedule Time for Emails
A day can quickly get eaten up by constantly checking and responding to emails. Do yourself a favor and set a specific time in your day to address your inbox and then mute notifications during the rest of the day.
Single Task
In the early 2000s, the American Psychological Association (APA) conducted a study on multitasking. They concluded, “…even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone’s productive time.”
Instead of shifting your focus between multiple tasks simultaneously, which you can’t really do effectively, try time blocking. That ensures your undivided attention can be committed to the task at hand.
Move Your Body
Make a point of getting away from your desk and shaking the cobwebs off at least once daily. Call the movement a Booster Break, and use it as an opportunity to get your body moving for 15 minutes during your work day.
Studies have shown that Booster Breaks improve physical and psychological health, enhance job satisfaction, and sustain or increase work productivity. Not interested in working up a sweat in your business attire? Simple stretching and rhythmic breathing can be used as Booster Breaks too.
Get Adequate Sleep
That old proverb about early to bed, early to rise might have been onto something.
The National Sleep Foundation recommends seven to nine hours sleep a night for most adults. Yet, on average, 30% of Americans get less than six nightly hours of rest.
Sleep deprivation impacts job performance because the neurons in the brain are overworked.
That results in slowed physical reaction time, limited emotional bandwidth, and brain fog, and may, in some cases, lead to dementia.
Outline Your Tasks for The Week Ahead
You can’t always anticipate what will come across your desk on a Monday morning. You can avoid the weekend overthinking trap by taking time on Friday to outline what you expect to work on in the coming week.
By spending 10 minutes on your Friday afternoon jotting down your priorities for the week to come, the tasks live on paper instead of taking up real estate in your brain.
Activate Your Boundaries on The Weekend
Take Off Your Uniform
Replacing your work clothes with comfortable, casual attire on the weekends is a physical reinforcement of the transition into time off work. Also called “Enclothed Cognition,” clothes systematically influence the wearer’s psychological processes. To help yourself subconsciously sign off of work on the weekends, shift your wardrobe to something different.
This action is equally, if not more necessary for folks who work from home—separating “work time” from “downtime” while in the same location benefits from a psychological shift.
Create Physical Barriers
Logging out, leaving your devices at the office, setting an out-of-office notice on your email: these are all physical acts you can do to create a weekday-weekend barrier for yourself. For those battling guilt, temptation, and anxiety over checking their email on the weekend, this one’s for you.
Set Time Limits
Sometimes the nature of your work will demand weekend availability. If this is the case, create time limits for yourself.
Hold yourself accountable to these time limits by setting a timer or installing a screen time limiter on your devices. Be sure to communicate your weekend availability limits to clients, colleagues, and managers before you shift your schedule to avoid any misunderstandings.
Let Go of “Caught Up”
The reality is that there are very few times in life when everything on your to-do list will be complete. There will always be tasks left outstanding, whether they are high-impact projects or mundane operational tasks.
The most efficient workers transition out of a work mindset over the weekend. They accept that there will always be something to do, but acknowledge that taking time to recharge will enable you to do those things to the best of your ability.
This article was produced by Career Step Up and syndicated by Wealth of Geeks.
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This post was previously published on Wealth of Geeks.
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