So, the thing with Friday’s off is that it really does change your world. For a little while – at the very end of my career as a CEO, I worked from home on Fridays. That was good, because I could finally get done work I had been attempting to get done all week. It was also bad: I found myself saving work to get done on Friday simply because I knew there would be too many distractions in the office. The result? My Fridays working from home started to become voluminous and overly stressful.
When I took the job with my firm, I had decided to work only part-time. Figuring that because I was the last man in the pecking order meant I would get whatever day was left, I wasn’t hopeful for Friday’s off. Imagine my glorious surprise when my peers were like, “Heck yeah. You can have whatever day off during the week you want. You just have to designate it.” Um, okay. How do I designate Friday?
Since then, I’ve had Friday’s off. Now, it’s not universal and I’m okay with that. There are times that a client needs something on a Friday or times when I have an early-week deadline that working on a Friday will give me a head start. There are lots of scenarios where I’d work on a Friday. But most of the time? Yep, I’m not working.
The values of Friday’s off are multi-fold. The biggest, of course, is a three-day weekend EVERY weekend. Plus, we have three Monday holidays that my firm observes and one Thursday holiday. That means that for four of the regular holidays of the year, I’ve got a four-day weekend. But in reality, it’s the three-day weekend that really puts the bounce in my step. Having Friday’s off means that Saturday isn’t obligated to housework and Sunday isn’t a pressure-filled experience to try and get some relaxation in before Monday. Instead, at just about 5:30 p.m. on Thursday night, my whole body seems to acknowledge that I’m off tomorrow and it’s an early weekend – again – for me to enjoy.
But here’s the deal: it’s not just the three-day weekend that gets you. At first, that’s all you focus on. Friday’s off and three-day weekends. Then, slowly, it starts to creep in: you only have a four-day workweek every week. And candidly, that’s the money shot. Four-day workweeks are pretty sweet. You work two days and your workweek is half over. Wednesday is no longer Hump Day, it’s “Friday eve” or that day just before the weekend hits. And the balance that is restored – four days on; three days off vs. five and two – inevitably starts to soften you up. First, your shoulders start to lower, then you find that you’re not stiffly holding your back or inadvertently grinding your teeth when you sleep. Speaking of sleep, you start to sleep better. It just works. I’ve often told my husband that if I do anything else career-wise, I would go down – not back up – and that 3.5 days on and 3.5 days off sounds about right for life. (But alas, if you’ve read my renovation post, you know that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.)
So, today is my Friday off. It’s not yet 8 a.m. and I’ve got a load of laundry in and I’m working on my second cup of coffee. I think our agenda today is to clean the house and mow the grass, so it’s not like we’re living the life of the fabulous around here. But if that gets done today, we can either work on our ongoing renovations tomorrow or do some outside work to begin getting firewood ready for the winter months. We should also have time this weekend for a little relaxation which may mean a campfire or – dare I even say it during a pandemic – a meal out.
Regardless, Friday’s off represents to me the shift in perspective from a life dominated by work to a life balanced between work and home. There is time now to do the things we want to do. Time to even do the unplanned things without creating undue stress. There is time to plan and dream; time to shut down and just be; time to take care of the routine and mundane; and certainly time to take on the big projects we often find ourselves in the midst of around here.
And that’s the balance I was looking for. In the rat race I was living in, time had become so many negative things. It was such a rarity and so overcommitted that I often felt like time was working against me. Just this one shift of taking one day away from work and handing it back to home substantially reshifted the balance in my life. Time no longer had those painful implications of being too scarce and elusive. It’s now available. It’s now reliable. It now works with me.
So, as I sit here on this Friday morning with the sun slowly burning through the fog, my second cup of coffee now empty and an entire weekend laying ahead of me, I am finally grateful for time and for Friday’s and for the incredible opportunity given to me to live differently. It has truly been amazing.
The Yuppie Homesteader 