A Weekend’s Work

by littlesarahbigworld

I work every Saturday and complain almost as often about the fact that I only have three days off per month. Friends will comment covetously of my Tuesday and Thursday mornings spent baking, running errands, cleaning house, listening to music…and I’ll just as quickly ask them what it’s like to have TWO DAYS OFF IN A ROW EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

(Perry Says it’s like having a mini vacation. Huh.)

Really, though, I do savor my mid-week breaks. I have all these little pockets of time while everyone else is at work to get my own shit done, and then when I DO work, I get to do stuff like eat snacks and paint on a big piece of paper. Then maybe I start drinking gin and tonics with grapefruit at 4pm to celebrate WHO KNOWS THIS IS ALL ENTIRELY HYPOTHETICAL.

I had an offer recently for a different job, one that would replace my two part-time jobs with a steady Mon-Fri 11-6. No evenings, no weekends, no conflicting schedules or mad scrambles to cover a shift. But I turned it down. I’ve got a lot of plans in the works, Friends, and for now this 3-days-off-per-month, kids-screaming-everywhere, waking-up-at-six-to-brew-coffee kind of life suits me.

The trick is to stop thinking about what I’m missing out on. So, sure, I don’t have a proper weekend, but I also don’t have the false hope of two days of freedom followed by the inevitable bummer of Monday morning. I just work all the time; it just all bleeds together into one steady stream of productivity. And then it just becomes my life.

A life where I care enough about the work I’m doing that I stop thinking of that 4-9pm shift as an interruption of my otherwise accomplishment-driven day and start thinking about it as an opportunity to get shit done that I care about, at work.

That is how I manage.

Also I drink a lot.