On the first few days of February 2021, I had decided to quit my job and take a couple of months off from the “system”. It was a scary thought since I had nothing planned ahead, apart from the vague thought of switching to freelancing. The constraints on money splurging activities during the pandemic allowed me to save enough to instil some courage on taking that leap.
My primary objective though was to go through the day, week and month without measuring time constantly. I had inculcated a habit of waking up and wearing a watch first thing in the morning since I was a kid. This was a clear indicator of being bound by the finitude of time and being constantly aware of it. It’s always running out.
Even though I wasn’t great at scheduling the day, I had a rough overview of what the day might look like. And there would be a mental map of how I’d spend my time from the moment I wake up in the morning. Although this seldom had any basis in reality. Often the day would deviate from its course of the “rough plan”. And I would eventually shrug my shoulders in resignation and carry on to go with the flow.
This mental mapping also meant that I used to see the day and the week as a unit. Since a month was too vast, it felt tough to reel it in to a feeling of control. The mapping of the day was often quite volatile. But the mapping of the week was far more predictable. This is because of the post industrial age tendency of us as a species working through the weekdays and actually coming to life on the weekends.
This feeling was aggravated by a colleague vocalising the need to “lie down and take it” from Mondays through Friday so that you can “live the life that you really want” over the weekends. For him it seemed like a fair bargain. For me it seemed like a bleak dystopian existence. Yes, it’s all about perspectives, but the narrative of signing off almost 72% of your life away to reap the benefits of the remaining 28% seemed like some warped observation of the Pareto principle I wasn’t comfortable being a part of.
So there I was, post serving my two month notice. Waking up a free man. Waking up on a new Monday sans the schedule. The prospect of looking at an empty Google Calendar felt like the risk of the leap was worth it. And so I went through the initial few days of being freed by the bounds of time.
I was technically under no obligations through the day, but a decade of working a job had instilled a physiological response of winding down only during the evenings. There was an air of alertness through the day on getting calls/messages. Despite having nothing on the charts. It was just the momentum of working for a decade that I was still feeling the inertia from. (Also, I suffer from scheduling anxiety, so even if a meeting is at 6pm in the evening, I’d be thinking constantly about it starting that morning till the actual event)
And then came the weekend. There was a sudden rush of endorphins just by the thought of it being a Friday night. Even though it barely meant any difference for me from a Wednesday night at this point. The sheer synchronisation of the week with a feeling of ease of an approaching weekend felt truly Pavlovian.
This feeling has also been backed by some research which states:
Time is a network good, and its value depends on one's ability to share it with other people in coordinated social and economic activities.
This is also the feeling which some perceive on taking an off on a workday and feel a tinge of guilt for not participating in the organisational routine their colleagues would be going through.
So my experiment on living sans the bounds of time was not going all the great. Primarily due to:
- The inertia of the having worked in a job for so long that my circadian rhythm had been in lockstep with the flow of a work week.
- The social bounds on how we perceived the week was deeply interlocked, as opposed to my previous notions of it being completely independent and individualistic.
Coupled with the fact that I’ve lived a good chunk of my recent life in larger cities, where there exists an invisible pressure to keep the pace above the social average in silent competition. Hence espousing the need to be productive at every given point, and losing any time being unproductive would be met with repercussions in the future. The constant feeling of working towards an annual report card felt very clearly like a big city thing.
All of this made sense of how even the whiff of the idea of a four day work week sounds so exciting. Cause even with a two day weekend. The latter half of a Sunday is usually spent grappling with the existential crisis of the impending chunk of weekdays. This I’ve realised is also independent of the workload that you’d have. It’s the feeling that punctuates the end of an eventful vacation, just something that occurs weekly.
A common strategy to combat the feeling of end of weekend blues has been by stuffing it with as many eventful things as possible to juice out the allotted time. This would mean planning the weekend stuffed to the brim, so as to not have time to mull over things that could have been.
But this strategy has not always worked out for me since it relies on some usage of imposed denial. That is, pushing away the feelings by not giving them breathing room to think about. This has always led to the accruing of feelings, spilt out later on the occasion of “having surplus time to think”.
Since quitting a work life and homogenising the weekend and weekday isn’t a practical approach for most, I’ve found the next best strategy is to focus on sculpting a rich(er) weekday. Not richer than the weekend, since there’s the luxury of time on our hands. But weekdays which have certain qualities you can implant which might not be something you can experience over the weekend.
And since a major chunk of a weekday is spent working, the focus can be shifted to things that lie in the periphery. This would usually mean embedding certain routines, tiny as they may be. The reason that these work better as routines is that it would require less planning and effort as opposed to a conscious attempt to indulge in novel experiences over the weekend. Low effort routines such as making a cup of coffee and staring out the window ten straight minutes like a serial killer or listening to a favourite podcast to ritualistically unwind from the day being certain examples. The idea being to isolate their sanctity only for the weekdays.
So far this strategy might not be a magic bullet to shoot down the pre-week blues. There are several other things that can make you feel better about an impending Monday, the primary one being looking forward to work at your job/project. But this has also lead to people putting themselves on gunpoint of having to “enjoy the work”. It’s something, I’ve learned over time, that can’t be forced.