Fun and Freeing Fridays

One Thursday morning in 2011, I saw my friend Charlie Gilkey tweet, “What can you do today to make your weekend more spacious?”.

As a mom of three kids, my weekends were anything but spacious. They were the opposite of spacious. They were filled with laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking, and yard work. Sometimes, school projects and hair appointments too. There was zero time for relaxing.

That one tweet from Charlie stuck with me and from that day on, I started thinking about his question. What could I do to make my weekends more spacious?

Little by little, I started doing things during the week instead of waiting to do them on the weekends. Laundry on a Wednesday, grocery shopping on a Friday, bathroom cleaning on a Monday. Soon enough, my weekends had a lot of white space.

Introducing Fun and Freeing Fridays

Five years and several iterations later, Charlie’s tweet lives on in my newly coined “Fun and Freeing Fridays”. Yep, I spend each Friday doing things that are FUN and FREEING to kick off my weekends on a high note and spend them however I choose.

FUN things I do:

• Take an extra long walk with my dog (we walk every day, but our Friday walks are more leisurely so James can sniff, sniff, sniff everything in his path)
• Go for a pedicure
• Have lunch with my mom
• Get ice cream with the kids
• Eat chocolate
• Make a new playlist on Spotify
• Take an Epsom salt bath with grapefruit + cedarwood essential oils (my latest combo obsession)
• Listen to an inspiring podcast
• Look for new recipes on Pinterest
• Chat with a friend
• Nothing at all :)

FREEING things I do:

• Pay bills
• Track my income and expenses (here’s the bookkeeping tool I use for this)
• Do laundry
• Clean the bathrooms
• Dust the furniture and woodwork
• Vacuum
• Make a batch of green smoothies
• Make my grocery list
• Have my groceries delivered
• Run errands
• Help the kids finish school projects or book reports

How about fun and freeing…weekdays?

Even if you work a 9-5 Monday through Friday job, you could still use some time each evening to free up space in your weekend. Enlist your kids. Make it fun. Invite your spouse to do “Cocktails + Cleaning” one night. Fold laundry while you watch TV. Set a 30 minute timer every night and bang out a task. It’s totally doable. You just need to decide.

And now back to Charlie

As my friend Charlie asked, what can you do today to make your weekend more spacious?