The idea for this blog came to me when I watched a not-so-known movie called “Tu Hai Mera Sunday” which is a movie about a bunch of guys who come to Juhu Versova beach every Sunday each week as an escape from the other issues that they face in ther lives. It’s a nice feel good movie that can be a breezy watch on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Back in 2016 to 2018, I was working in Kotak Wealth Management in a pseudo sales cum advisory role where, as per my business head, I was supposed to spend 75% of my time “hunting” and 25% of my time “farming”. Now, getting new HNI or corporate clients was a daunting task for someone fresh out of college like me and once my honeymoon trainee period was coming towards the end, my stress levels shot up and I could feel the stress manifest itself physically in my body.

Now, sales could have been a little easier for me if I had reasonable control over my destiny and performance where there were some lines drawn and at least some predictability on the outcome or if the product/service you’re trying to sell has some standout feature. Unfortunately, this role was very much an open and very loosely defined field with plenty of competition and barely any differentiation between them.

This stress rolled over to the weekend when I chose to shut myself from work most of the time but still not escape from the mild anxiety that always lingered over me. Sales can tend to destroy your self-confidence and it did affect me to some extent. I largely wasted my weekends either lazing around or going out somewhere. The only real productive things I did on weekends is hitting Cubbon Park on Sunday mornings and the gym on Saturday early in the evening.

To deviate my mind from this uncertainty (where will my next convert come from? how will I target and approach them? what happens if I don’t hit my targets?), I ended up wasting a lot of time on my phone or watching sports or spending late evenings outside. For someone who has covered 25 books for 3 years in a row now, I barely covered 3-4 books on average back then, neither did I pursue any major hobby.

There was also this mild-yet-constant anxiety of wanting to impress the opposite gender and that too lingered over your head and took your mindspace, to whatever extent, back then.

Thankfully, my life is little more sorted now personally and professionally. I look back at those 2 years - how I could have done so much more on the weekends that I would feel good about now. I could have built a muscle that could shape me better as a person. Wasting away weekends can be less damaging to you if you are 14 or 19 when you’re a student but it far more harmful to you once you cross your mid-20s.

Why are weekends important, especially in your 30s?

Built-in accountability

I’ll not use the much abused terms “productivity” and “work-life balance” - neither of which I truly believe in - to describe the importance of weekends. I’ll try explaining this in another way, the best I can.

Throughout our lives, we’re trained to study or work when we are accountable towards someone or towards our organization. In school, we want to get good grades and be accountable to our parents and at work, we want to get paid well and be accountable to our manager or our organization. As we grow up and have more responsibilities on our plate, we burn ourselves out on weekdays and then feel too tired or lazy once the weekend comes where we suddenly don't know what to do without time when each of you spend is not accountable towards something.

We push out things that we should be doing at this phase of life to the weekend but on the weekend, we are too tired or we’re too occupied with chores and other daily routines to make those things happen.

I believe that the short-term aim of anyone is to find happiness and the medium to long-term aim is to be satisfied. Happiness is fleeting and can come and go but satisfaction requires something that you need to build towards week after week, month after month, year after year. Satisfaction can be derived from your professional pursuits but ask yourself, is the goal of your life and how you want to live it be defined by professional pursuits alone? Isn’t that limited and I daresay, a little dull or limiting? What about the more beautiful things in life?

Weekends are important because it is the window when you can spend disproportionate time building towards these beautiful things in life.

Understanding how people spend their weekends

I wanted to understand how people around me spend their weekends and how they feel about it and if I derive any insights from it. So for the first time in many years, I floated a Google forms survey, albeit a badly designed one, to understand this.

The idea was NOT to be judgemental, but to simply observe and look for patterns.

Here is the link to the survey and here are the key takeaways:

Note - there is a clear bias in this survey in terms of an inclination towards salaried millennials and the same survey would show very different results if it were directed towards people in their early to mid 20s.

Also, just like every survey, the inputs given by people have an obvious flaw - sometimes people vote as per what they wish to be vs what they really are, even though this survey was anonymous. It takes a great amount of self-awareness and courage for someone to vote as per what they really are.

How people spend time?

1. Spending time with the family seems to be a clear winner in this survey - quiteunderstandable and very healthy, especially if you have kids

2. Playing sports or spending time outdoors seems to be the next biggest activity - this was a pleasant surprise to me

3. Lazing around is the third biggest activity - I'll hold back my judgment on this and let a certain finding that I'll cite after this summary help you navigate this

4. Watching movies/sports falls fourth - I guess this is similar to point 3 in a way

5. Pursuing hobbies like painting, writing comes in next at fifth

6. Spending time on your office work comes in sixth - something that honestly came as the biggest surprise to me and I'll tell you why later on

7. Unfortunately, the last priority seems to be developing new skills - something that I find to be very Indian in its characteristic - more on this later

A LOT of people messaged me and also wrote that spending time on household and personal chores should feature high on this list - something that is completely understandable and a true testament to how millennials are now truly adulting

The flawed design of this survey and the statistical limitation limited my ability to derive deeper insights from this survey but here are some insights that I could derive-

1. People who feel mildly/fairly anxious on Sunday evenings have a much higher vote on "I laze around and relax" than people who feel good on a Sunday evening

2. There is surprisingly no real correlation between the number of hours one spends on work and how one feels on a Sunday evening

3. Less than 25% of the respondents are fully "happy" with the way they spend their weekends - a clear indication that they feel that they can do more on a weekend

4. People who feel "happy" about how they spend their weekends seem to spend a disproportionate time outdoors or playing sports or participating in some other physical activity

5. People who feel "guilty of wasting time" tend to spentdthe least amount of time outdoors or playing sports or participating in some other physical activity

When I asked the question “Any subjective comments are welcome here - what do you wish you could do to improve your weekends and what are the obstacles you face?”, here are some of the responses.

Some thoughts on how you should spend your weekends

A friend of mind who was in Switzerland for a long time expressed his angst at how rigid the Swiss were. For example, if you approached them asking if they were free for a drink or dinner on a Saturday evening, they’d look at their calendar and tell you that they are fully occupied in the weekend.

Now I don’t suggest such a rigid approach to anyone - the Swiss can pull it off because they live in a more individualistic society that is extremely orderly and has predictability unlike our society in India, where it’s the opposite.

However, ask yourself, do you want to while away the prime of the youth just “spending” or “passing” your weekends? Is this how you want to build your lives? Do you want to do more and “never settle”?

Millennials are a unique bunch - we don’t have the linear progression that our parents witnessed in their lives (largely due to living with multiple constraints) but neither are we exposed to the plenty like Gen Z or Gen Alpha. We are the in-betweeners and this applies very much toward how we should spend our weekends.

We have so many plates to juggle which Utsav Mamoria terms “the Great Squeeze”.

Sometimes, in this midst, we can get so overwhelmed that we can’t do everything that we end up doing hardly anything.

There is no perfect way to spend your weekend - one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Someone may prefer not working at all on the weekends because they are spent on Friday night, while someone like me wants to work for a bit on weekends so that my weekdays feel less stressful and I don’t have to work for 12-13 hours on a weekday, thereby cutting down my workout time or reading time. That is why I was surprised to see that “Spend time on your office work” came so far below in the results of my survey. Why not work a little on a weekend so that you can do things beyond work on a weekday?

The golden rule for weekends, as per me is that are you doing things that bring in positive energy so that you can be happier on a Sunday evening and more satisfied in the medium to long term.

Happiness can come from a good workout at the gym and satisfaction can come from that feeling of being fit and healthy.

Happiness can come from finishing an enjoyable or insightful book and satisfaction can come in from being aware and living an intellectually rich life.

Happiness can come in after a good evening with your friends or family and satisfaction can come in after you nurture and develop long-lasting relationships.

There are 2 key takeaways from the survey that I feel are universal truths - spending more time with your family and spending more time outdoors OR in some physical activity are great ways to spend your weekends. Both of them add positive energy that fuels you and helps develop a more rounded personality.

As a large majority of the respondents on my survey, if you are also not fully happy with how you spend your weekends, the first step is to internalize that you can do more on weekends. Especially you, dear reader, who feels that many years just fly by between work and “spending” weekends. The very act of responding to this survey is s step towards this where you are seeing the mirror and hopefully thinking about this.

Laura Vanderkam explains that weekends, if counted from Friday evening have only a fewer number of hours than an average work week of 40 hours. But because there’s less built-in accountability, we waste it. For years, she used a time-tracking device to monitor how she spent her weekends — not to scare herself into productivity, but to become more aware. She calls it “The Weekend Experiment That Will Change Your Life,” and it did change hers. Seeing how she actually used those 48 hours led her to spend less time mindlessly checking email and more time reading, puzzling, and doing things worth remembering.

The key message from the paragraph above is to be first aware that you waste away a lot of time on weekends and before you realize it, it’s already bedtime on a Sunday night. Try checking your screen time on your phone (and maybe add TV time as well) as an easy proxy for what Laura had done.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to muster the motivation to get around and do things that you want to do - “I’m so tired”, “Let’s do it next weekend”, “I want to watch a movie for now” are some of the excuses that creep into your mind. So the second step is to build routines. Routines can be signing up for that fitness class or that guitar class. A Routine can even be visiting a new restaurant every Sunday afternoon.

Routine reduces the friction between what you want to do and your actual actions and reduced the amount of motivation and willpower you need to burn

Third - If there are things you’ve wanted to do, list them down, pick the top 2 and start TODAY. Start with baby steps but at least start somewhere.

Finally, cut out or at least minimize anything that develops negative energy - this can be doom-scrolling reels and Instagram or sleeping late at night after excessive pub/party time. Learn to say NO when you need to say no (and learn to do so without offending others). Create a cleaner environment around you - a mess around you creates a mess in your mind and brings in negative energy, to some extent and I’m sure the folks who indignantly messaged me what I didn’t include “household chores” in my survey, definitely agree with this.

Watching the occasional movie or show is fine, especially if it makes you happy or brings you awe or makes you think. But don’t let it consume your weekends.

In fact, not doing anything is also not a bad thing to do sometimes. Going for a walk without your earphones plugged in is not the worst thing in the world. It can calm your mind, declutter it and invite new thoughts and eventually - new ideas.

This very Substack newsletter that you read is a product of points 1,2 and 3 above. Many people ask me how I write so consistently and the simple answer to that is that writing has always amongst the top-most things I’ve wanted to do for many years (I admired the clarity that writers and columnists have and wanted to emulate the same), I started somewhere with baby steps and I build a routine that allows me to write regularly.

I feel happy each time I publish a blog, and I feel immense satisfaction that this is going to be my 91st blog in 3 years.

I urge you, the reader, especially that 75% of the respondents who are not very happy with how they spend their weekends, to take charge of your time and do more and feel better.

Weekends are not very different from weekdays - you still need discipline and responsibility to get through it - the only difference is that you are accountable to yourself rather than someone else. You commit to yourself rather than your manager or company. You invest in your weekends rather than just spend them.

I promise that you WILL feel better about yourselves in the long run.

I also promise to float less erroneous and more thoughtful surveys the next time onwards! Pinky swear.