The Weekend Dilemma

Are you working for the weekend?
Photo by phanlop88

I can never decide whether weekends are good for working or if I should try to stick to the five-day work week and give myself some time off.  During the week, I see the weekends as a pool of available hours that can be used to catch up on projects.  Those weekend hours look especially appealing to me on days like to today when I have to help out in my daughter's preschool, take my son to an occupational therapy appointment in Seattle (which winds up being about a four-hour round trip), and there's a sink full of dirty dishes waiting for me too (note: this post was actually started on Monday morning and finished on Wednesday, which is probably indicative of the problem!).

But then the weekend comes, and the last thing I want to do is actually sit down and work.  I got some stuff done this weekend.  I got some reference information to the magazine publisher who needed it for some statistics I quoted in an article, and I have the newsletter almost completely done for the preschool (just waiting on some photos... if they don't get the info to me by today, I'm publishing it anyway though).  Unfortunately, I only got about two hours of real pay-the-bills work in throughout the entire weekend though.

The excuses are, of course, numerous:

• I need to catch up on housework.
• I want a break from the hectic week.
• I want to spend time with the family.
• I want to catch up on my reading.
• We rented a movie that I really want to see.

And so on and so forth.

The problem is that if I don't dedicate at least part of my weekend to work, I feel like a total slacker. Part of this is because of days like today when I know I'm only going to log two or three hours of work at most (I'm going to take my netbook to the appointment though and hopefully sneak at least another half hour in).  The other part is that I feel a strong commitment to my clients, and when deadlines are tight, the time has to come from somewhere, and I'd rather not stay up until two in the morning trying to get the work done.  

Another option is to plan to work the weekend and make other days throughout the week my days off.  While making Monday my day off sounds ideal, I think it's not very practical and could make clients not-so-happy, since that's the beginning of the work week for so many people.

Decisions, decisions...

Do you work on weekends or do you declare them hands off?