We’ve been working for the weekend all week long in our wives who work from home series and we’ve talked about planning your schedule, getting respect for your work and keeping your husband from steamrolling your business. Today, we’re going to focus on a subject that is actually the hardest one in the world for me: the weekend.
A weekend is defined as the end of the week; it typically falls on Saturday and Sunday. If you work in an office, you usually have the weekends off. When you work from home, however, there is no real such thing as a weekend. Yesterday, our daughter graduated Kindergarten and I’m going to enthuse far more about that in another blog later today, don’t worry (I know you weren’t).
Weekend Plans
More often than not when people ask me what I am doing over the weekend, I usually offer them a list that sounds like this:
- Laundry
- Swimming
- Going to the library
- Working
- Working
- Oh and did I mentioned working?
A typical Saturday morning begins around 4:30 when I get up and hit the treadmill for thirty minutes, then brew a pot of coffee before heading into my office to dive into my writing for a day. I try to limit the time to a couple of hours before breaking to do stuff with my daughter and with my husband. If I am carrying a heavy schedule of work, I end up working a great deal of the weekend and it’s hard to just kick back and relax, because the work is there whether I do it or not.
Spouses & Sharing Time
It’s important to share time with your spouse. As much as you live with your work and you are home and your work is right there, it’s important to respect the time when you and your spouse are at home together. My husband and I often try to set our weekend tone on Friday. If he has work he’s brought home to do, we’ll try to swing it so we’re both working at the same time.
About three weeks ago, I got up early, and worked for a couple of hours before taking our daughter to the library. When we came back, my husband and I hooked up in the kitchen to make brunch and then we spent the next couple of hours working together around the house. When our daughter fell asleep watching a movie, we both took a break to get some work out of the way before reconvening in the kitchen to make dinner and then after dinner plans.
These are the kind of weekends where we fall into synchronicity, but that doesn’t just happen – we have to make it happen. We work together – both on our work, our commitment to home and our commitments to each other. We have to talk about it, we have to know what the other one is doing and sometimes, we even indulge each other and let our eyes glaze over as we wax poetic about the projects we have on the table.
In the long run, it comes down to the two of us working together to create the kind of weekend we want to have. How do you and your spouse work for the weekend?
Are you enjoying this series? Be sure to send in your questions, comments, concerns and more for wives who work from home and we’ll be revisiting this issue on Monday! Have a fantastic weekend.
Be sure to check out the home business blog for great tips on starting and running your home business.
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