What Successful People Know About Weekends

By Laura Vanderkam | CBS MoneyWatch

We all look forward to weekends. But are you really making the most of them?

Few people are, because we tend not to think about weekends holistically. Here's one way to look between 6 p.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Monday. Even if you sleep for 24 of those hours, that leaves 36 That's the equivalent of a full-time job. Yet many of us hit Monday morning with a vague sense of precious downtime on activities that didn't help us recreate.

That's a problem because, in our competitive world, weekends are actually the secret weapon of workplace most successful people know that to be truly productive, you need to hit Monday refreshed, relaxed only way to do that is to create weekends that rejuvenate you rather than exhaust or disappoint you.
So how do you do that? It's a three-step process.

1. Ask what you'd like to do with your time. We have a tendency to turn weekends into a death have-to-dos. There are poorly planned hours devoted to children's activities (you wait in a dance book to read); errands (buying a new grill that you don't make time to use); chores (cleaning a basement dirty again); and inefficient work (checking email compulsively just because your smartphone is on). Make a list of anything you'd like to do or have in your life. Aim for at least 100 items -- 1,000 would to dream up anything that would make you and your loved ones happy, a bag of tricks that includes creative but doable. You aren't going to Egypt this weekend. You could put on a puppet show for neighborhood could go running on that new trail you keep meaning to try. You could write a love letter to your spouse.

2. Make a plan. Serendipity is great, but as any kid waiting for Christmas morning knows, anticipation component of happiness. And in our distracted world, failing to make a plan increases the chances your weekend in front of the TV. In consultation with the rest of your household, pluck 3 to 5 items and peg them to the major weekend spots: Friday night, Saturday day, Saturday night, Sunday day, include ideas from the three categories of activities that, beyond obviously pleasurable activities like What Successful People Know About Weekends, sex, make people happiest: socializing, spiritual activities, and exercise.

Here are some examples....Await!....


Weekend #1

Weekend #2