After 5 p.m. it's Friday

How to cultivate a weekend mindset, even during the week

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to adopt the mindset that after five pm
it's Friday. You just might find yourself feeling more relaxed

(00:26):
and enjoying your time after work. More so, over the
past year or so, I've become more and more interested
in how people spend their evening hours. In another year
or two, I'll publish a book called The Golden Hours.
I'm making the most of your weekday evenings. This time
is so hard to use well. People are tired, and

(00:50):
in many cases we have family or household responsibilities. But
it's also a lot of time to simply write off.
I collected time logs from a ton of people to
analyze their evenings, and I can report that on average,
people had about five hours after they finished work and
before they went to bed on weekdays. Multiply that by

(01:14):
four nights from Monday to Thursday, and we are talking
twenty hours a week of potential family and leisure time.
Of course, one of the reasons it's hard to really
relax and enjoy this time is that we know we
are going to work the next day, there will need
to be preparations for getting up early in school schedules

(01:35):
and activities and so forth. But honestly, if you have
young kids, you may be up early on weekends anyway.
You have the activities then as well. And yet in
general people still feel more relaxed on weekends. So here's
an idea to contemplate. Not too long ago, Professor Cassei

(01:57):
Holmes was a guest on this show. She talked about
one of her studies or she found that when people
were told to treat their upcoming weekends like a vacation,
they generally enjoyed themselves more. So, if thinking of the
weekend as a vacation can make it more enjoyable, then

(02:18):
I think thinking of a weeknight as a weekend might
do the same thing. So repeat this phrase to yourself
after five pm it's Friday, even if it is five
pm on a Tuesday, there is no reason not to
feel like you are off and relaxed and enjoying some

(02:39):
restorative time. You can linger over your dinner even if
it's Tuesday, and you can enjoy your downtime at night,
after your chores or after your kids go to bed,
even if it is a weekday. My guest is you
don't stay up all that late on Friday night if
you've been working all week. So we're not even talking

(02:59):
about not upsetting any sleep schedules. We're just not approaching
the next day as some battle to be prepared for
tomorrow is going to happen one way or the other.
So after five pm, it's Friday. I really like this phrase,
and I have been experimenting with saying it to myself. Now.

(03:22):
Obviously a pithy phrase can't actually make a Tuesday into
a Friday. You should probably still go to work on Wednesday,
but it does make the time feel a little different,
at least for me. Perhaps you will find this phrase
helpful as well. In the meantime, This is Laura. Thanks

(03:44):
for listening, and here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.

(04:13):
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