Why “Making the Most of the Weekend” Is Overrated

5 min read//

Somewhere along the line, weekends acquired a job description.

They became the place where everything was meant to happen: rest, fun, productivity, connection, personal growth, maybe a long walk, a decent meal, a sense of having “lived your best life” (urgh), and ideally a clean house fully of prepped meals and laid-out outfits by Sunday night.

It’s a lot to ask of two days.

The idea of “making the most of the weekend” sounds positive on the surface, but in practice it can turn perfectly reasonable time off into something surprisingly stressful. Instead of relief, weekends come with pressure. Instead of rest, they come with a low-level sense of underperformance. Oh, hi anxiety.

And if your energy is low — which, in winter especially, it often is — that pressure becomes quietly exhausting.

The problem isn’t that you’re wasting your weekends. It’s that the bar has been set in a very strange place.

The Weekend Is Not a Redemption Arc

One of the biggest issues with the whole “make the most of it” mindset is that it turns the weekend into a corrective experience. What I mean by that is:

If the week was busy, the weekend must be restful.
If the week was dull, the weekend must be fun.
If the week was draining, the weekend must somehow fix that.

That’s a really heavy responsibility for a couple of days off.

When weekends are treated as some sort of redemption arc, they stop being time off and start being more like a performance review. You’re constantly assessing whether you’re relaxing enough, enjoying yourself enough, using the time wisely enough.

Ironically, this is usually what stops weekends from being restorative in the first place.

Low-Energy Weekends Are Normal!

There’s a lot of content online built around “maximising” your days off. Morning routines, productivity resets, ambitious plans framed as self-care. These can all be great – if you’re in the mood. But it all assumes a baseline level of energy that simply doesn’t exist every single weekend.

Especially in winter.
Especially after a long week.
Especially if life has been quietly demanding lately.

A low-energy weekend doesn’t mean you’re burnt out or doing something wrong. It usually just means you’re human.

The problem is that low-energy weekends don’t photograph well. They look like cancelled plans, quiet afternoons, familiar meals, and doing things a bit slower than usual. Which is precisely why they’re often the ones that actually help.

The Pressure to “Use the Time Well” Backfires

There’s a certain kind of frustration you can feel on low-energy weekends. You’re tired, but also vaguely annoyed with yourself for being tired. You have time, but not the drive to do much with it. Everything feels optional, which somehow makes choosing harder.

This is usually where the internal commentary starts:

You could go out.
You should probably do something productive.
You’ll regret wasting the day.

Don’t listen to it. Give yourself a break. It’s the weekend!

Honestly, the more options you give yourself, the more draining the weekend becomes. Trying to “make the most” of the time just adds another decision to a brain that’s already had enough.

Doing Less Is Often the Most Sensible Option

There’s a quiet skill in recognising when a weekend doesn’t need improving — it just needs containing.

That might mean deciding, early on, that you’re not going to cram things in. You’ll do one thing that feels manageable and let the rest of the time be flexible. You’ll eat something familiar. You’ll leave some things undone. Not because you’ve given up, but because you’ve paid attention to your body and state of mind.

These weekends rarely feel exciting while they’re happening. They feel uneventful. Slightly flat. Comfortably dull.

But then Monday arrives, and you actually realise you’re not quite as depleted as usual.

That’s the job done.

“Productive” Is a Very Narrow Definition of a Good Weekend

Another unhelpful side effect of the “make the most of it” mindset is that it tends to prioritise really visible outcomes.

Clean house.
Batch-cooked meals.
Admin sorted.
Steps counted.

None of these are bad things. They’re all great. But they’re not the only things that matter — and they’re certainly not the only markers of a weekend well spent.

Rest, on the other hand, doesn’t always produce evidence. Neither does recovery. Sometimes the only sign a weekend has worked is that you feel a bit steadier than you did on Friday.

That’s not laziness. That’s maintenance!

Sometimes the Win Is Cancelling Plans

There’s a strange guilt attached to cancelling weekend plans, even when you know you’re tired. You imagine future-you regretting it. You picture yourself bored. You assume you’re missing out.

In reality, cancelling stuff is often the moment the weekend improves.

Staying in doesn’t need to be justified with exhaustion or illness. Sometimes it’s simply the better option. The one that requires less effort, fewer explanations, and no recovery period afterwards.

Your social media might not celebrate these decisions, but real life benefits from them all the same.

A Quieter Weekend Doesn’t Mean a Smaller Life

One of the reasons people cling to the idea of “making the most” of weekends is the fear that, without effort, life will somehow shrink. That if you’re not maximising your time, you’re wasting it.

In practice, the opposite is often true. Life expands when it’s sustainable. When it has room to breathe. When not every available hour is treated as an opportunity that must be seized.

Quiet weekends don’t make life smaller. They make it livable.

Winter Weekends Are Allowed to Be Unremarkable

Winter changes the rules. Energy dips. Motivation wobbles. The world gets smaller for a while. That’s perfectly ok.

Expecting winter weekends to behave like summer ones is unrealistic, and quietly exhausting. They serve a different purpose.

In winter, weekends are about holding things steady. Keeping yourself warm, fed, rested, and vaguely functional. Anything beyond that is a bonus in my book.

When you stop asking winter weekends to be impressive, they usually start doing their job much better.

The Most Useful Weekend Is Often the Least Instagrammable One

The weekends that actually restore you rarely look like much. They’re the ones where nothing particularly happens. Where you don’t have many stories to tell. Where time passes gently instead of urgently.

They don’t announce themselves as “successful” — you only notice afterwards, when the week ahead feels slightly less daunting than usual.

Those are the weekends worth having.

You Don’t Need to Make the Most of Everything

Not every part of life needs to be optimised. Weekends don’t need squeezing for value. They don’t need upgrading. They don’t need to compensate for everything else.

Sometimes the most sensible approach is to let them be ordinary. Quiet. Adequate.

If a weekend leaves you rested enough to carry on, it’s done exactly what it was meant to do — even if you never once felt like you were “making the most” of it.

And honestly, that’s plenty.