Should you work this weekend?
Readtime: 2.5 minutes
It's Saturday morning. You've decided to do a couple of hours of work. But what kind of work?
This choice matters more than you think.
There are two obvious answers.
The first says do your hardest, most valuable work because your weekend hours are even more precious than weekday ones, so you should extract maximum value from them.
The second says do the easy stuff – it's the weekend, keep it light, clear the decks, and save your energy for Monday.
Both feel logical. But I think the real answer depends on something else entirely.
It depends on what Monday looks like.
If your Monday is packed with back-to-back meetings and you know you won't have time to think, then the weekend might be your only window for deep, strategic work. If Monday is relatively open, then maybe clearing admin at the weekend is a reasonable trade – because you can save the deeper thinking for the actual working week.
There's also the question of guilt…
Most people feel some level of guilt about weekend work. Either guilty for working when they should be present with family, or guilty for not working when they know there's a lot to do.
Easy admin tends to make this worse, because it drags on and seeps into the whole day without any real sense of completion. You're sort of working but sort of not, and neither part feels good.
Whereas hard, focused work for a defined window can feel very satisfying – and then you're done. Two sharp hours of deep thinking might leave you feeling better than five scattered hours of emails.
Which connects to something else I've noticed: Admin expands to fill whatever time you give it.
If you sit down on Saturday to "just clear a few emails," you'll be there for hours and still not feel done. Admin is bottomless. It never gives you a sense of completion because there's always more. So if you're going to sacrifice weekend time, there's something to be said for sacrificing it for something that has a clear finish line.
And then there's the compounding effect. Two hours of deep strategic work on a Saturday can completely change how your week unfolds. You walk into Monday knowing you’ve got ahead (or at least you’re not so behind…).
I'm not sure there's a right answer here. Sometimes the deep strategic work genuinely is the best use of a Saturday morning – you think more clearly, you start Monday ahead, and it feels worth it.
Sometimes a low-effort admin session is what you need – clearing the mental clutter so you can start the week with a clean slate.
And sometimes – hopefully most often – the best answer is to close the laptop entirely and do something else with your Saturday.
I think the main thing is being deliberate about the choice. Not just opening the laptop out of habit and seeing where you end up. Deciding in advance what you're going to work on, how long you're going to work on it, and then stopping.
Let me know how you get on this weekend!
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. If you’re a leader and would like your team to be able to communicate with each other better, my ‘EQ Advantage’ workshop series is a) fun, and b) incredibly effective. I can deliver it in-person or remotely. The average star rating is 4.6 out of 5 and nearly everyone would recommend it to others. Reply to this email if you’d like to find out more.