4 Things Successful People Do On Weekends (And It's Fun)

The author of What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend shows us how to have more get-up-and-get-ahead during the rest of the week.

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1. Unplug From Your Week, E-mails and Tech

Yes, successful people work a lot. Martha Stewart, for instance, has famously claimed to sleep just four hours a night. But there are times to push and times not to. We need both. "A decade ago, I let my days just sort of all blend together," says James Reinhart, whose San Francisco-based online clothing resale platform ThredUp.com has grown from 30 employees to 140 in the past year. After starting the company, though, he realized that "it's the quality of my decision making that ultimately makes the company successful." Without the time to go into refresh mode, "you never end up with the space to think."

So now he makes a point of golfing from 6 to 8 in the morning before his family wakes up, getting out with his daughter, and running. Reinhart claims to do his best thinking while hitting the trails in a nearby state park. "I come back from runs with clarity on decisions I want to make," he says. (He may be onto something; a number of neurological studies have found that exercise improves brain function.)  

Of course, in a world where we tether ourselves to our inboxes, unplugging is easier said than done. You take your iPhone along when you meet a friend for coffee. She's five minutes late. You start checking your email and, boom! Work

mode is back. That's part of modern life, but you can still carve out a few hours for a "tech Sabbath," which is time with no electronic devices. Try turning the smart phone off Friday or Saturday night and turning it back on 24 hours later. Probably nothing has changed, save for the level of your energy. 

2. Make Plans And Create Anticipation 

If you spend your workweek running—or worse, flying—from place to place, you may think you want to collapse on the couch all weekend. But resist the urge: First, it's impossible to do "nothing." Second: Think of the logistics. Want tickets to Cirque du Soleil? So do other people. Need a babysitter? She won't show up on a whim.

Finally, research into human happiness is finding that anticipation accounts for a major chunk of the mood boost associated with any activity. One well-known Dutch study of vacationers found that holiday-goers were happier than people who weren't taking vacations, but the increased happiness largely happened before the trips, as people anticipated the fun to come. 

Compare it to opening Christmas presents: The act only takes an hour, but seeing wrapped gifts under the tree stretches out the joy for weeks. If you make a reservation on Wednesday for a Saturday-night dinner at your favorite restaurant, you'll spend the next three days imagining your pasta carbonara to come—which improves your weekend and your week. 

3. Ditch The Chores, Have Fun Instead

Using the weekend to catch up on chores is probably the hardest trap to avoid. After all, if you work full-time, when else are you supposed to do the 15.1 hours (for women) or 9.6 hours (for men) of household activities that the Bureau of Labor Statistics claims the average American does each week? But housework will take all the time you are willing to give it. After all, women in 1965 spent more than 30 hours each week on housework...and we haven't descended into complete filth since then.

So consider doing your chores during the workweek; the chores will take less time because you have less time. This will leave your weekends free for more rejuvenating activities. Throw a load of laundry in before dinner and have the kids either do the dishes after or fold. Make a quick trip to the grocery store at 8:30 p.m. on a Wednesday. The place will be so empty you'll zoom through. If a sparkling house is important to you—and sometimes it is—then designate a short cleaning time on the weekend, perhaps on Sunday afternoon. That way, if you find yourself looking at a messy house on Saturday morning, you can tell yourself that there's a time for cleaning, and now is not that time. When the cleaning window arrives, set an alarm and do as much as you can in an hour. When the time is up, it's up.

4. Take Control Of The Last 15 Hours.......

I struggle with this trap myself. I love what I do, but sometimes the sheer volume of work waiting for me Monday morning makes me look at the clock come Sunday afternoon and fall into a total Sunday funk. But the thing is: At 3 p.m. on Sunday, I still have 15 hours before I'll wake up Monday morning, including seven hours before I need to go to bed. Why not seize that time?


This is why Sunday nights have become my new favorite time to host parties. Most people are free, and there's a more relaxed vibe than at the formal get-togethers people expect on Saturday nights. Order food, have a beer, enjoy your friends, and you'll be far readier for the workweek than if you spend that same time thinking about your inbox. As Reinhart puts it, failing to relax, run and refresh on weekends "makes me not a good husband, not a good dad and a terrible CEO." Success requires recharging the batteries from time to time—so you can hit Monday refreshed and ready to conquer—if not the world—then your own life.

Reference: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/how-to-make-the-most-of-your-weekend

By Laura Vanderkam is the author of What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend: A Short Guide to Making the Most of Your Days Off and 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think.

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That moment when everything just clicks.....and you find peace

Sometimes you wonder whether reading all this 'stuff' helps..... Maybe our mind just needs time to mull it all over, before we are able to fully integrate into our lives and find peace.

7 Tips to Get Monday off to a Great Start

 

What is it about Mondays? 

We take it as a given, that at some point on Sunday a sense of gloom and anxiety will settle in as we think about the week ahead. Even if we like our jobs and the people we work with. Crazy, isn’t it?

Research conducted on the subject of the Monday Blues gives us a variety of intriguing information—from the fact that people’s moods are not any lower on Monday compared to other days, to the theory that it’s not Mondays we’re reacting to but change, as we transition into the work week, according to a New York Times article, “Mondays Aren’t As Blue As We Think.”

One of the best ways to set yourself up for a great Monday is to give yourself weekends that rejuvenate and restore you. With some organizing and planning, you can greet Monday with open arms, and increase your productivity in the workplace. Here are seven tips for you:

1. Pace yourself....leave some energy for the weekend!

A lot of people work themselves into the ground over the week, leaving themselves nothing more than a two-day couch potato on the weekend. Do whatever you can to avoid this—you want to spend Saturday and Sunday with enough energy to actually do fun things and have a functioning mind that can think creatively about work and your life. A couple habits to cozy up to:

• Do you ever stay at work for an extra hour or two trying to “finish something up,” when in truth you work in circles and don’t accomplish anything super meaningful? Stop doing that.
• If you’re not actively moving your project or the business forward in any significant way and it’s well after 5 p.m., call it quits. Save your energy for the next day. Think of it like exercise: Those two extra miles you run today might put you over the edge so you can’t run tomorrow.

2. Use Friday afternoon to prepare for Monday.

(this is probably my personal favourite tip and definitely helps!)

It’s amazing how much you can forget in those 60-plus hours between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. 

To hit the ground running on Monday morning, a few suggestions:

• Write yourself a Monday to-do list that explains where you left off on a task, or what’s next.
• Write a more detailed note about what you were working on—what was going well, what you were excited about accomplishing or capturing, what you want to go back and redo, or an idea you wanted to pursue.
• Make your note encouraging and motivating, rather than a marching-order list of to-dos. (Remember, this is for your eyes only. What will get you pumped up on Monday?)
• Better yet, use your project planning software to create a Monday task and update it at the end of every Friday (or at an appointed weekly time). You can include a to-do list, as well as a more descriptive note, as a comment.
• Even better, name that task, “Happy Monday you gorgeous creature!”

3. Plan the right mix of weekend activities and events.

As a rule, you’ll have the most satisfying weekend if you mix in a combination of: physical activity, family and friend time, scheduled activities and open time. 

You know better than anyone what works for you and your family—and how that might vary by season, weather and life circumstances. Crafting a restorative and fun weekend takes planning. In Laura Vanderkam’s book, What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend, she offers these six secrets of successful weekends:

• Do an activity that brings you a lot of joy.
• Use your mornings for personal pursuits.
• Create traditional weekend activities.
• Schedule downtime.
• Make time to explore and have adventures.
• Plan something fun for Sunday night.

4. Use the weekend to get ahead.

Super ambitious professionals use their weekends to advance their careers and businesses. With less structured (and uninterrupted) days, there’s time for creative thinking, brainstorming and problem solving. Also, not to step on your work-life balance commitment (we’re all for it), but if you left work on Friday with a tsunami of work breathing down your neck, tucking in a few hours of work on an uninterrupted Saturday afternoon might be just what you need to feel good about starting your work week.

5. Don’t waste your Sundays.

Isn’t it crazy that we can spend so much time on Sunday dreading Monday? Here are two very different ways to spend your Sunday evenings:

• Plan some evening fun. For some of us, Sunday evenings are sacred do-nothing nights. But if you schedule an early dinner with friends, a movie date, or an evening picnic at a park,  then you give yourself a positive focus for the day.
• Spend a few hours planning your Monday. For some people, diving in to their work week on Sunday evening is a highly productive and satisfying use of their time. For managers and leaders, you give yourself a leg up on everything that meets you Monday morning, and you can see what’s expected of your team. There’s an incredible amount of time wasted on Mondays simply catching up on where you left off the previous week. You can avoid hours of this if you prepare on Sunday evening. And you’ll wake up Monday morning feeling calm.

6. On Monday, pace yourself.

You don’t have to move mountains or work a 12-hour day. A week is like a long-distance event. Go out too hard, you’ll be spent by Thursday. As an incentive, plan something fun on Monday—lunch out with a colleague, splurge on a favorite coffee drink, little easy things. It doesn’t take much to perk up a mood.

7. Don’t give in to the Monday story.

If, as the New York Times article suggests, Blue Mondays are a myth, then try an experiment. Pretend you love Mondays. When the anxiety creeps in on Sunday, tell yourself you’re perfectly OK with everything. See what happens if you create a new belief system for yourself about Mondays. Because if you really think about it—Mondays are nothing more than another day of the week, where anything can happen, even greatness.

What are your Monday strategies?

Reference: https://www.liquidplanner.com/blog/7-tips-to-get-monday-off-to-a-great-start/

by Tatyana Sussex

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Five time management tips for busy entrepreneurs

Through necessity, most business owners learn the art of thriftiness, making small cost savings that, collectively, make a big difference to profit margins. But few apply that technique to their time management, even though we all agree that time is money. 

One UK-based study in 2015 found that administrative tasks cost small firms 28 hours a week, accounting for a £5bn annual shortfall to the UK economy. As such, here are some time management tips.

(1) Kick the chair habit

We’ve found that just by standing up we can compress a meeting into half the time. If you don’t sit down and get comfortable, no one feels the need to extend the meeting to make it “worth it”. Say your bit, then disperse – no hanging around.

The health benefits of standing are now widely accepted, and “they” say sitting is the new smoking. A BBC and University of Chester study discovered that standing to work for three to four hours a day burns the same amount of calories in one year as running ten marathons. Of course, this also means you don’t need to run any marathons, so consider that a bonus time saver.

(2) Ignore your mobile and inbox

Controversial this time management tip, but one of the biggest ways I’ve boosted my productivity is by ignoring my mobile and inbox for most of the day. For years I dropped everything to answer my phone and practically lived by my inbox. It almost became a game to see how quickly I could get back to people who emailed me and I took pride in my rapid responses.



The problem was I’d get to the end of a day having achieved nothing towards my business goals because all my time had effectively disappeared, eaten up by assisting other people. And because people knew I’d reply straight away, I’d get more and more emails. It was self-perpetuating. So these days I only answer my phone if it’s a pre-arranged call. All others are screened by voicemail and, if I need to call back, I do so when I have otherwise dead time, like when I’m driving.

Other than keeping an eye out for urgent messages, I work through my email inbox once every couple of days. That way I can continue to work with focus and free of distractions.

(3) Down with admin

If you’re booking your own train and plane tickets, ordering stationery, chasing late payments and restocking the office kitchen, then you’re not successfully wielding time management. You have three options: delegate internally, outsource to a virtual assistant or automate these tasks.

Cloud-based accounting software will send clients polite automated reminders to hurry up and pay up, while shopping sites like Amazon and Ocado can be set to automatically re-order office shopping lists periodically.

(4) Don’t read the news

Unless you’re a reporter, or you’re in communications, reading the news is a huge obstacle in a
time efficient and productive working day. Moreover, we then carry around fear and anxiety from reading the latest nuclear threats coming from North Korea or Trump’s latest tweet.

It’s something many of us do because social media platforms, and notifications, are designed to keep you hooked on checking rolling content all day, every day. To disconnect, you have to make the decision to do so. Turn those notifications off and make news harder to access.

(5) Live by your calendar

This is key when it comes to time management. An unstructured day can waste hours of time. By using your calendar as a to do list and scheduling your day you’ll find it much easier to be productive.

This should include time for reading and responding to emails, calls, travel, dealing with unplanned things that crop up and of course the main objective you want to achieve that day. Set just one main task per day because, if your list of jobs is too long, you’re only setting yourself up for failure.

Reference: https://realbusiness.co.uk/hr-and-management/2018/01/31/five-time-management-tips-for-busy-entrepreneurs/

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Barnaby Lashbrooke is the founder of UK and US virtual assistant platform Time Etc

ABOUT AUTHOR

REAL BUSINESS

As the champion of UK enterprise for 20 years, Real Business is the most-read SME website dedicated to high-growth businesses and entrepreneurs. Through daily news, unique insight and invaluable guides we are an essential resource for thriving businesses.

Short commutes make us happier than sex (apparently it's true)

Long commutes are not fun, according to the poll. We all know that commuting long distances isn’t fun, especially if we do it on daily basis. But what makes us happier – a short commute or sex?

 

Well, according to a poll of 3,000 Londoners, short commutes came out on top. And while none of us particularly relishes a marathon slog to work, it seems like a journey of less than 30 minutes – the city average is 39 minutes – is enough to make us happy. We have all been stuck on a train in sweltering temperatures stuck nose-to-armpit with the person next to us. Dreading those rush hour commutes, eh?

In those circumstances you can see where people are coming from. Time Out surveyed thousands of Londoners about what made them the happiest, with nearly 87% reporting they had felt happy in the last 24 hours. The number jumped by more than 2% among people who had recently had sex – but the increase was even more dramatic for those with a commute of 15 to 30 minutes.

What else makes us happy? Being in a new relationship, making a new friend and earning more than £40,000 a year. Volunteering, exercising and going to the pub also proved popular activities for increasing one’s serotonin levels. Getting your commute down to under 30 minutes could significantly improve your happiness levels.

All pretty reasonable really. But the poll also found our capital city is the most stressed in Europe, with renting proving to be a major cause in this. Eating lunch at your desk, checking emails, going on Facebook or Instagram, not sleeping enough, earning less than £20,000 a year and smoking also contributed to increased stress levels.

Oh, and also ‘being a millennial’ is a major cause of stress apparently, though there’s not much you can do to fix that one.

What makes you happy?

by Tom Herbert

Reference: http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/30/short-commutes-makes-us-happier-sex-7272335/

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