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“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
— Annie Dillard
It’s never too late to realize that there’s still room for improvement. Don’t stand in your own way.
Life is short, and our main goal is to have a good life, at least most of the time.
We don’t want constant stress, but we want enough money. We want to laugh, feel joy and have things to look forward to.
Unfortunately, our world is not always like that. Some people have more support, more money or better circumstances.
It’s not fair. But we learn to deal with reality somehow.
A lot of people organize vacations to recharge or use the weekend to forget the tough week behind them.
Everyone has their own strategy, but most people optimize for weekends. Many of them drink on Friday and feel depressed on Sunday.
And then, when they go on vacation, they try to compensate for the last three months with food, alcohol or shopping.
The goal is to feel at least a little bit alive after the workweek.
I know because I was one of those people.
After I survived the week, I usually turned into a self-indulgent hedonistic monster. I ate a medium rib-eye steak and drank the slightly more expensive red wine. Then I went to a bar and ordered expensive cocktails. On Saturday, I ordered pizza, took a bubble bath, put on music and used fancy bath oils.
After that shitty week, I deserved that. That was what I told myself.
But then Sunday came.
I started feeling bad. I looked at the clock every hour. The end of the weekend was depressing because I didn’t want to believe it was already over. The next day, I had to get up and go to work again.
That was my life for more than ten years, and I know a lot of people who have some version of the same ritual.
Maybe you too.
Monday started, and it felt like I was breathing in and holding my breath until Friday. Then I could finally breathe out again because the hard part was behind me.
It doesn’t sound like a good life at all.
Even writing about it gives me that weird feeling in my stomach again.
Fortunately, over the last five years, I managed to change the life I had lived for so long.
I turned the weekdays I wanted to escape from into days I can actually enjoy.
I thought this was just how life worked
The problem was that I had never thought about solving this problem because it felt like an inevitable part of my life.
Like death, something we can’t avoid but can only accept.
That’s also why I’m writing about it now, because I know a lot of people probably haven’t thought about it either.
Most of us simply inherit this way of thinking: survive the week, enjoy the weekend.
My parents lived like that too. During the week, they complained endlessly about work and life.
The weekend was the part where you were supposed to recover.
Around five years ago, I started asking myself a different question like:
Why don’t I focus on making my weekdays better instead of trying to force everything into two short days?
And no, I’m not talking about drinking during the week or turning every Tuesday into some huge event.
I mean getting to a point where you don’t even need to numb yourself on Friday because the week wasn’t only endurable, but actually okay. Or even enjoyable.
And that naive idea turned into something I started to take seriously.
The excuses come fast
This is usually the point where people think: “Yeah, but it’s not that simple.”
Your job is exhausting. Your commute is terrible. Your boss is awful. You have kids, debt, health problems, annoying colleagues or responsibilities you can’t walk away from.
I understand that reaction because I used to have it too.
And I’m not saying your situation isn’t difficult.
I believe you when you say it is.
But after years of learning about awareness and reflecting on my own life, I noticed something important.
There’s a difference between saying, “This is hard,” and immediately concluding, “There’s nothing I can do.”
The second one is where we often get in our own way.
Not because the problem isn’t real, but because we stop looking for possibilities before we even start.
I did that for years. I explained to myself why things couldn’t change, then used those explanations as proof that I shouldn’t even try.
At some point, I realized I didn’t want to be right about being helpless because I wanted my life to get better.
That’s when I started looking at my weekdays differently.
Look at your week honestly
If you want to improve your weekdays, the first thing you need to do is review them.
What causes the most pain?
Commuting? A stupid boss? Draining work you don’t like? Annoying colleagues? Being tired all the time? Never having enough time for yourself?
Don’t start venting about those things yet. Write them down. Use a note on your phone.
Once you have written down the bad things, do the same with the good ones.
What do you actually enjoy during a normal weekday?
The coffee in the morning? Time with your wife, husband or kids? Playing with your dog? Five minutes of reading? Going to the gym? Cooking? Listening to music on the way home?
And even there, try to be radically honest.
Do you actually like that coffee, or do you buy the same thing every morning because you’ve always done it?
Notice the small things that make you feel good without requiring much effort.
Write those down too.
After that, you will have two lists:
What makes my weekdays worse?
What makes my weekdays better?
That gives you something concrete to work with.
Fix the things that drain you first
Take the negative list first.
Let’s say commuting annoys you more than anything else.
The easy reaction is: “There’s nothing I can do about that.”
Don’t stop there.
Think about it as if I were your best friend and came to you with the same problem.
What would you tell me?
Maybe you’d tell me to look for another job closer to home.
When was the last time you checked the job market?
Could you work remotely one or two days a week?
Could you move closer to work eventually?
Could you change the way you commute? Car, train, bike, different hours?
Some of these are big changes, but they can also have a huge return.
If something makes you miserable every single weekday, it’s worth taking seriously.
These problems are not always things we simply have to accept forever.
Maybe you can’t change them in a day. Maybe it takes six months or a year.
But there’s a big difference between something taking time and something being impossible.
For many people, these changes feel like moving the biggest mountain on earth because they have become less flexible over time.
But living deliberately requires some flexibility and proactivity.
The company you work for won’t move closer to your home because they care about your weekdays.
You have to care about them.
The same approach works with other pain points.
If a colleague makes your daily life miserable, what can you actually do?
Have you talked to your boss?
Have you talked to that person and said how you feel?
A lot of us carry problems for years because we assume we can’t talk about them.
Then we finally say something and are surprised that people react much better than expected.
Give it a try.
And if nobody helps, that’s useful information too.
Now you know the environment won’t support you in that area, and you can start thinking bigger. Maybe that means looking for a new job, starting something on the side or making another long-term change.
The important thing is that you stop treating recurring pain as something you simply need to accept.
Make more room for what already works
I think the most important thing is to reduce the number of problems and things that make your weekdays feel bad.
But there’s another side to it too.
You already have a list of positive things.
How can you get more of them?
If you love spending time with your kids, could you spend more time with them instead of automatically watching Netflix?
If you enjoy walking your dog, could you make that evening walk longer instead of eating ice cream on the couch while complaining about your day?
If you genuinely love coffee, could you improve that small moment? Better coffee, a cup you like, ten minutes on the balcony instead of drinking it while checking emails?
If going to the gym reliably makes you feel better, can you protect that time more seriously?
These things sound small, and that’s exactly why they matter.
Most of life is made up of small things repeated over and over again.
Your ordinary days matter more than you think
By reducing the pain and increasing the good parts, you can slowly change the balance between weekdays and weekends.
Most of our lives are not holidays, birthdays or Saturday nights.
They’re regular Tuesdays.
That’s why it makes sense to put more effort into improving those days instead of expecting two weekend days to compensate for five difficult ones.
The transformation takes time.
For me, the beginning was the hardest part because I wasn’t used to thinking this way.
If you don’t have that muscle of being flexible and proactive, it can feel uncomfortable as hell.
The old routines constantly invite you back to the place where nothing changes.
You complain; you feel drained; the years pass and your life stays roughly the same.
That’s why I wouldn’t wait too long.
Life passes faster than you think, and you don’t want to spend most of your valuable weekdays simply waiting for them to end.
For me, it took a few years to get to the life I’m living now.
Today, it doesn’t matter nearly as much what day it is because I feel good on most of them.
And that has taken a lot of pressure off my weekends.
I don’t spend Wednesday planning some huge event for Friday or Saturday because I desperately need to escape the week I’m currently in.
I still love weekends.
But I don’t need them to save me anymore.
Thank you for reading.
It means a lot that you spent your time here.
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