Why I Don't Work on the Weekends
October will mark my two-year anniversary since going freelance. Besides scaling my business up to a place where it’s sustainable at all, one of the biggest learning curves for me was figuring out the best/work life balance. See, when you’re working for someone else and beholden to a regular 9-5 schedule (or in my case, when I was living in China, a 9-6 schedule,) your time is way more structured than the average freelancer. A big mistake that many new freelancers make is making themselves so flexible that their work hours end up being all over the place.
I feel into this trap myself when I started off. In those early days, some of the jobs I was relying on, were given out mostly on a first come first serve basis and worked on American business hours. I found myself staying up late at night trying to vie for certain gigs. Other times I would wake up and different points in the night, or early in the morning to check if I got any responses to emails I sent out, or if anyone had posted and quick gigs, like transcribing that I could snatch up right quick. Besides my wacky sleep schedule, some companies just didn’t want to deal with the hassle of working with someone who was not in America, or at least in a closer time zone. And that was a real bummer. Sometimes I would get upset with myself, angry when I wasn’t able to throw my hat in the ring right away.
I’ve always had issues with conflating my sense of self and worth with the amount of work I’ve done or produced. In the years after college I worked at a cupcake shop in downtown Brooklyn. Many nights I’d come home near midnight, anxious and upset, berating myself for not applying to better jobs or doing more writing after I got off. I was so hard on myself for not being productive for every part of the day.
Years later as an editor at City Weekend, work consumed me, between being in the office for most of the day and having official/unofficial after-hours and weekend work to do, I regularly put in 60+ hour work weeks. I was exhausted damn near all the time, and by the time the whole staff was laid off a year later, I knew without a shadow of a doubt, I never wanted to do that shit again. “That shit” being work a job that expected unpaid hours and labor around the clock.
Freelancing started off rough, but eventually the hard work paid off and I was able to ditch the content-mill gigs in exchange for higher paying assignments that didn’t require me to be on standby in the middle of the night. I decided to start keeping 10-5 hours (mostly) and let that be it. With these changes of course came more stability in my work life and quarantine has slowed things down even more.
Deciding not to work on the weekends came rather organically. I never sat down and said to myself, this is how it’s going to be. After setting daytime work hours for myself, I kind of just naturally stopped replying to work emails and doing work in general on the weekends. Not working on the weekends has two payoffs for me. The first is of course the power that comes from having firm boundaries. I’ve had people message me at all hours of whenever, who’ve just gone ahead and sent the work brief over without me even responding to them if I’m available or interested or not.
Drawing a line in the sand empowers me and gives me a sense of autonomy over my business and life in general. Besides that, I also love having a set time where I can basically do whatever and have no obligations whatsoever. If I want to watch five episodes of Love After Lockup back-to-back, that’s my business. If I want to sleep in, or make pancakes and lazy about, I can do that too.
Not working on the weekends reminds me to put myself first. After all, I’m the boss and can do what I want.
