Each weekend is an opportunity to get ahead of your goals
As soon as Friday rolls around, we celebrate. It is the beginning of time off from a week filled with work and school. If you work weekends, the information here still applies, as I have worked 6 days a week too. I know that if implemented and understood, you too can take advantage of each weekend and use them to propel you further towards your goals while still enjoying yourself.
If you think about it, most people look forward to the weekend to sleep in, rest, and recover. They avoid the routine and they veer from their daily habits. Most people use the weekend to spend money, over eat, and stay up late. There is nothing wrong with this approach, if this is what your definition of your weekend is.
For those that are seeking improvement and looking to get one percent closer to their dreams and goals each day, the weekends are a gold mine.
The weekend is a block of time within your week where you can work on all of the hobbies, habits, and activities that will help you achieve your greatest dreams.
We can only reach greatness one day at a time, and the weekends are a great opportunity to move that much closer to it.
Here Are 5 Choices That You Have Each Weekend
1. Wake Up Early Or Sleep Until Noon
When it comes to so many things in life, balance is important. Throughout the week, people get up early, very early. They wake up to take kids to school, they go to work for long hours, and they come home to cook and clean. Only to have one or two quiet hours to themselves before they need to go to sleep and just repeat the same process all over again.
So, believe me I get it. When the weekend rolls around, it is so easy to throw on your PJ’s on and want to just loaf all weekend. But, in these moments is where you define your choices.
You always have two choices in life: you can choose the easy path, or you can take the road less traveled by- a.k.a the hard lonely road. The same applies to your weekend. You can choose to continue the momentum with good habits— such as waking up early, or you can sleep in. The choice is yours.
By waking up early on the weekends, and applying the same amount of discipline and consistency that you do during the week, you now have more time available. Not only do you have more time available, but maintaining a consistent sleep pattern across the board is beneficial for your overall health. You avoid groggy mornings and eliminate the time being wasted laying in bed.
Use the weekend time to work on all of the things that you value and cherish. Spend time working on the ideas that go by un touched because of the hectic weekday schedule.
Those ideas, goals, and dreams are diamonds in the rough. Don’t waste the free time that you have available. Use that free time to work on the things that you love most.
2. Get Some Exercise Or Skip The Gym
There isn’t anything that I enjoy more than going outside and breaking a nice sweat while enjoying Mother Nature. The blue sky, the green grass, and the sun beaming down on your face, is something that most cannot get enough of throughout the work week.
With the hustle and bustle of life today, most people can’t find the time to get outside and enjoy nature. The weekends are a great time to seize this opportunity to clear your mind, while benefiting your body.
Each weekend, you have the option of skipping your exercise routine, or sticking with it. You can go back and forth with yourself, trying to justify how much rest you need, or how you can skip the weekends. But let’s face it, exercise and daily physical movement is necessary and not something that should be passed up.
Each weekend that passes you by, is an opportunity lost. I believe the proper mindset should be to enjoy your exercise even more on the weekends. Make it a part of your day, where you look forward to completing it and not wanting to run away from it. The weekends are the greatest opportunity you have to get closer to your health goals, and really reset your mind for the upcoming workweek. Don’t pass them up.
3. Eat Healthy Or Eat Fast Food
How many people do you think eat nutritionally sound Monday through Friday, and then when the weekend rolls around, it’s the see-food diet?
I have fallen victim to this approach for far too long. I used to think it was normal, simply because so many people around me were adopting the same way of life. It wasn’t until I got tired of spinning wheels with my fitness goals, that I began to realize I am wasting my time and effort eating this way.
The weekends is a great opportunity to eat off the menu, so to speak. Eat something new, something different, something fresh. I am not saying to not enjoy and indulge. But I am saying, that you have two choices when it comes to food on the weekends. You can stick to the game plan and inch toward your goals, or you can toss your goals and dreams out the window each weekend and then wonder why you never made it to your destination.
The decisions that you make each weekend are yours and they affect you, so choose wisely.
4. Work On A Side Hustle, A Hobby, Or Party All Night
Growing up, friends would invite me to a new party every weekend. It seemed like every weekend there was a new party that we were automatically going to. I didn’t have a clue that you could make your own decisions to stay home and work on your goals and side hustles. As terribly obvious as that may sound, it’s the truth. I thought, that because everyone around me was all about partying on the weekends, it was the right thing to do. It was what people did, so I just rolled right along with it.
Wasn’t until I got older, and realized that many of those parties turned out to be a complete waste of time. Some parties were good, and were worth the time investment, but a lot of them were the same thing over and over.
If you like that type of lifestyle, I respect it. I just look back and have realized that if I was smarter with the way I was investing my time back then, I could have been closer to my goals than I am today.
It’s one of those moments in life where you connect the dots looking backwards, and you apply the wisdom so that you can move forward in the right direction today.
For anyone who is reading this at the moment, and may be considering whether or not your night life with your friends is worth the investment, I am not going to say that it is not, but if you do have this thought or notion, you should follow it and begin spending your weekend time more wisely. This way, in 5-10 years you can be so much further ahead than I was. 🙏
5. Fix Your Finances By Spending Less Or Ignore Your Finances And Spend Excess Money
We spend pretty much our entire week working for money. We trade 40-50 hours a week (some way more) away from our family, so that an electronic deposit hits our account.
If you are getting the electronic deposit to hit your account without the need to invest your 40+ hours a week, you are well ahead of the game. But for the rest, it is about working to live, survive, provide, and hopefully one day, thrive.
With each weekend you have, you have important choices to make. You can either move closer to your goals and dreams, or you can choose to spend money that you don’t need to be spending. With the schedules that most people have, they don’t have the time to spend money throughout the week, unless it is food or gas. It is the weekends, where people can let their spending habits fly out of control. Consequently, this sets you back.
I worked in banking for years, and my job, was to help clients achieve financial confidence within their financial realm. A consistent trend that I would see often, was an increase of clients coming to ask me for an overdraft fee to be refunded. This would typically happen on Monday’s, right after the weekend.
The reason for this, was because most people are one, not on a budget and two, are over spending on the weekends. This creates a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, and in many cases, going red and owing the bank money with no money to pay up.
Instead, use your weekends to sit down and go over your financial picture. As scary as it may sound for some, it is imperative to consistently tend to your finances. For the rest of your life, you will need to manage your money.
You might as well take time on the weekends to educate yourself on finance, and create strong budgets to help you get closer to your financial confidence.
Summing It All Up
In the end, this is an eye opening approach to the weekends, something that I was never aware of in the past. The understanding that each weekend you have choices to make, and those choices are going to either move you forward, or they will push you further from your goals and dreams.
Everyone on this planet has a dreams and goals that mean something to them deep down inside. We cannot put those dreams and goals to rest. We must execute on them one day at a time. Therefore, each weekend becomes a huge block of time where you get to put in work on the things that you love most.
Don’t spend your personal time getting so caught up in the trends, that you put your dreams and goals to sleep.
Hopes this helps someone out there 🙏
