Why Your Weekend Needs a To Do List by Niki Jads

Aren’t weekends simply the best? Why Your Weekend Needs a To Do List?

They are your two days of me-time. Your two days of peace. Your two days to do anything you want and escape from any worries your weekdays may bring. For some, it is absolute heaven.

But don’t you just hate it when you wake up on Monday morning and feel like you have completely wasted your entire weekend?

And by that, I don’t mean spending your whole weekend binge-watching shows on Netflix, because hey, on a good day that can be the best way for anyone to spend their weekend. In fact, I personally vouch for it. Nothing makes me as happy as watching a wonderful rom-com series with a big bucket of popcorn and an endless supply of lemon teas.

By wasting your weekend, I mean feeling like you haven’t done much with your time and dreading going back to work or school for another 5 days, just waiting for another weekend to come by and wasting that too. Basically, a dreaded cycle of time wasting, feeling unfulfilled, getting mad at yourself for it, and expanding no new wave in your interest or even building any resource of your personality.

And there is nothing more I hate than wasting my time.

So quite recently, I took my weekends as the time to meet friends, work on my written pieces and invest some time with family and just relax. Relaxing to me can mean TV shows, movies, video games and writing some more.

But as of late, I feel there has been a certain mundanity that has crept into my weekends.

Meeting people is fun and everything, but sometimes plans don’t work out. Adulthood comes with disappointments of how little you see your friends no matter how badly you want to. The family has their own routine and schedules and sometimes, they don’t really have the time to give you the interaction you are looking for. If you live alone, TV shows can get a little boring after season 8 episode 16. And as you lay in bed, oscillating between that annoying half sleepy state and complete boredom, you think to yourself ‘Is this what the rest of my weekends are going to be like for the rest of my life?’

That was exactly how I have been feeling this month. The feeling of being useless and listless overtook me. And I hated it. But I did not know what to do about it. Yes, work has been so mentally demanding for the last 2 weeks that all I feel like doing over the weekend is staring at a TV screen with DJ Tanner and the Fuller House family. But after a point, especially when it was 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, I would think to myself- This was it? This was my pathetic weekend?

And as much as I love Mondays, I started to dread them for the first time in my life.

So aside from bracing the lack of a social life and human interaction, I began to look for things that made me happy or re-purposed my weekend to make sure I was utilizing my time and investing them into an area in my life where I felt like I had to improve.

I started categorizing them, no matter how minuscule they were. My exercise routine, working on side writing projects, a little pamper sessions for myself, doing all those tiny things that I don’t get the chance or mind space to do over the weekday, and maybe even trying out a place to eat or a recipe.

So I did the very last thing expected of a person trying to save their weekend: I made a to-do list.

But not just any to-do list, oh no.

This was a leisure list of things I wanted to accomplish over the weekend. Yes, not just simply do, but accomplish.

My list did not have a time frame, or a schedule, heck, it did not even have an order. It just had tasks I wanted to do that made me feel like I accomplished something in one hemisphere of my life, that I wanted to work or develop on. In fact, I hadn’t even called them tasks or actionable. I just made a list and did whatever I felt like it from that list. Simple.

Oh, and did I mentioned I had things like Wash my hair, sort the laundry, clean the living room, eat lunch, make that chocolate coffee for the afternoon, watch 2 movies and 4 episodes and also write about that thought you had on Wednesday with that one thing.

I wrote down the minutest of things, but anything that made me feel like I was making the most of my time. Even if it included me writing down things which you don’t really need a list for. Things you do for fun, or maybe just to pass time or even things you want to do to have fun.

But as long as there is a good balance of things you are doing that help you take a small step towards your goals or the things that help you relax, or even pamper yourself a little, at the end of the day, they all inevitably make you feel you did something, or even better, you did so many things.

Because a wasted weekend is a wasted opportunity to change your fate.

Okay, I know that is a little dramatic but you know what I mean. Time equals to money.

Just having more time to do things, helps you put yourself in such a good position in life. And right now, no one is realizing the value of more time as much as I am, and I hope you do too.

So what are you waiting for? Go and get your weekends organized!