Happy Friday – How To Make The Best Use Of Your Time On The Weekends

Today’s Topic & What You’ll Learn

• Learning how we wait till last minute to schedule our weekends, leaving us with little opportunity to plan properly
• How to optimize planning the weekend out without over scheduling
• Ways to leave time gaps as fillers in case things go horribly wrong
• Ensuring you leave extra time free on Sunday to accommodate anything left over that wasn’t completed

Mama Robbins

It’s Friday morning and you realized….what in the world am I going to do this weekend? Maybe you have so much going on you have no idea how you are going to get to it all.

Whether you are a Stay-At-Home Parent, single, married, dual income or not, we all get busy. But how busy you get can make or break you. We want to find ways to accomplish some of the things that need to get done, but we also want to take advantage of the family time we have been given.

Making The Most Of Your Weekend

• Don’t Wait Until Saturday Morning To Plan Your Weekend – Have you ever woke up Saturday morning wondering what you were going to do today?… You get up and do your usual routine and before you know it, it’s 4pm and you haven’t left the house. Do you feel super unproductive because you had so much you “wanted” to get done or activities with the kids and never got around to it? Throughout the week, write a few things you want to accomplish on the weekend. At latest Friday evening, sit down and hash out a plan. This will leave you feeling revived looking forward to your plans tomorrow and not leave you last-minute scrambling and missing out on your weekend.
• Don’t Over Plan – Too many times I see people who have more to get done over the weekend then there are hours in the day! Between kids activities, chores, studying, errands and anything else you wanted to complete, sometimes we just need to take a step back and see how much we actually HAVE to get to. #1 – Figure out the MUSTS. What are the things you absolutely can not get out of or avoid? #2 – Figure out what other “realistic” things you can get into your day without over packing your weekend. One of the biggest struggles we have is saying NO. Learn the word and use it often if needed. Your weekend should be something you look forward to and can enjoy.

• Don’t Expect To Get To It All – Once you have a few things planned over the next few days, PLAN for setbacks that will either take away an activity or change the timing it will occur. If you plan ahead for things to not go as expected, you will not only find yourself less frustrated when it doesn’t pan out, but you will also be able to make adjustments accordingly with some of the other time you have left.
• Leave Time Gaps – When all else fails and something wasn’t able to get done, or maybe you just needed to push something back, you can leave time gaps to rearrange your schedule. Try to avoid scheduling back-to-back activities. For example: maybe you were supposed to go to the library with the kids at 10am, but your baby’s nap went longer than expected. Now you find yourself leaving at 11, and you had something else scheduled at 2pm. That still leaves you ample time to get the library in. Keep in mind, maybe you just need to take it off the schedule altogether.

• Make Up Sunday – On Sundays leave a few time slots intentionally for things you still really wanted to get accomplished on the weekend, but never got around to on Saturday. Whether this is a house chore that kept getting pushed off because your toddler was having tantrums, studying you need to get in, or maybe the weather was horrid and you couldn’t make it to grandmas. I find scheduling a maximum of two activities on Sunday is enough to keep the family busy, but doesn’t take up so much time I can’t add anything else.

• Optimize Free Time – Over the Saturday and Sunday you left some time gaps to ensure if anything goes wrong you can accommodate the new schedule without it setting you back too much. If nothing goes off the rails, have a list ready of a few things you can maybe squeeze in “if you feel up to it”. Don’t make this an expectation and above all, do NOT PLAN for this to happen. This is merely a time filler to get extra things accomplished. Maybe you make a special trip to the park with the kids because lunch finished early and your next activity isn’t until 4pm. Maybe you make a trip to the grocery store because grandma made a surprise visit and you were originally planning on going over to her house. Whatever the task may have been and the time that comes available, use it to your advantage. But if the day has been rough from the start and you get a few hours of free time to do whatever, maybe take this to just stay in the house and do what little you can.

Regardless of how your weekend turns out, the main thing to remember is time is the one thing we spend that we can never get back. So what are you doing with your time? Figure out ways to make the most of it.

I hope you can take away even one tip that will help you this upcoming weekend. I use these tips to spend as much time with my family as I can on the weekends because the kids are in school all day. I usually only see them a few hours each weeknight before bed. So I optimize my time where I can.

If you are struggling to find time to get those well-needed chores done to have more time on the weekends, you can also read “Letting Go Of Control To Get Chores Done & Having More You Time” I also have a post for Back To Work Mondays – How To Overcome The Dread Of Tomorrow, and Hump Day Wednesday – The Secret To Keeping You Motivated To Finish Your Week.

Until Next Time – Follow Me: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, & Instagram.

Sincerely,

Mama Robbins