4 ways to use your weekend productively

Weekends for most of us enlist couch-potatoing in front of the laptop, binge-watching movies and TV shows, and sleeping till noon. As ideal as these activities sound to you right now, you’re still choosing to dedicate valuable time, where you can get a world of work done, to mindlessly tuning out instead.

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Don’t get us wrong, we aren’t asking you to work to the bone on the weekends. It is, after all, your well-deserved break from an undoubtedly tough week of overworking. But, it is also important to not treat every weekend as a mini-vacation. Your mind, health, and body need a different kind of exercise all together, one which they won’t receive if you’re drooling into your pillow for the better part of the day.

To use your time in the weekends more actively and productively, here is a list of things that you can do instead of Netflix and snore.

Pick up a hobby

Paulo Coelho once said, “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.” The scariest part of routine is that you don’t even realise how comfortable you get with it. As a result, the thought of even trying your hand at something new and unfamiliar becomes intimidating. But if you don’t have even one idea, practice, or activity outside of the one you exercise five days a week, then you are simply denying yourself the chance to grow, spiritually or otherwise. To prevent yourself from becoming a well-oiled machine, make sure that you pick up one hobby – anything from singing classes to learning a new language – which you can train yourself to follow through during your weekends.

Plan out your weekend

Weekends are made for relaxing, but in the pursuit of the kind of peace it offers, we tend to while away the precious hours. To that end, it is important to plan out these two days, not like the work-itinerary that you’re automated to do during the week, but rather like a plan that can guarantee a light-winged, fun-filled, yet productive, weekend. So if you want to take the kids to the park, check out the dancing fountains, or even schedule dinner and drinks with your friends, plan it out beforehand. In this way, you won’t end up wasting any time in coming up with a plan, the process responsible for more than half of them not working out at all!

Start a tradition

This could be something as simple as cleaning out your closet every Saturday, something considered highly therapeutic by some, or even having family over for lunch on Sundays. The trick is to break the monotony while simultaneously acting on the plans you have been writing off for ‘later’, for a good amount of time now. Follow this tradition because it will bring in a different kind of discipline in you, one that will positively go long way in all aspects of your life.

Travel the unexplored

When you’re slogging out at your desk from nine to five, five days of the week, there’s a kind of release that your mind and body are both crying for, and this is the cry for adventure. You have two days in the whole week to try the unknown and dive headlong into a pool of undiscovered possibilities to make up for the otherwise comfortable monotony you experience through the week. Try something new every weekend! Camp under the stars, go for a movie alone, try a new dish, and write for a publication – no new deed is too small, or too big, to keep you from experiencing life at its most exciting.

So don’t spend this weekend stuck in front of the TV for six hours. Challenge yourself to try something new and exciting, and once you push yourself to take a foot in that direction, your weekends will never be the same again.