Preferred Days Off

Commodore

Deity
Joined
Jun 13, 2005
Messages
12,059
Simple thread here. When do you all prefer to have your days off from work? I currently have mine on weekdays and I prefer that because I'm not much of a party guy, so I use my days off to run errands and take care of personal business. That is much easier to do in the middle of the week than it is on the weekend and I can do it without taking any of my allotted time off.

So which do you all prefer: weekends or weekdays for your days off?
 
When I could still work, I preferred one day in the week and one on the weekend. Friday-Saturday or Sunday-Monday. That way I had one day for doing errands and one day for doing whatever. Lots of places here aren't open on the weekend so having one off day during the week helped with getting those things sorted.

If I could still work now and if I could choose, I'd probably want more than 2 days off a week. 4 on 3 off would be fine for standard shifts.
 
Saturday, because that's when my friends are off so we can meet up and do stuff.

Sunday, because, after the above, I need a day off.
 
I have the weekend off normally. Usually I take my paid vacation days to make a longer weekend, but once I took a Wednesday off to break the week in half and didn't regret it at all.
 
Assuming we have to pick 2 days out of 7, Saturday and Sunday. It's when other people usually have their downtime too, making it easier to organize gettogethers and camping trips and so on.

Plus sleeping in on Sunday and doing nothing all day feels a lot more normal than doing the same on a Wednesday.
 
assuming I can't select all days, I prefer any week days. At the moment it doesn't matter which ones.

Places are too crowded on the weekends.
 
I have all my days off.
 
Have you gone crazy yet?
Not yet. For the first 6 months or so my wife struggled. :D

Spoiler :
I am spending 15-20 hours a week mentoring small businesses/start ups and helping to organize this.
 
Back when I was doing the home business thing (had three going at once - typing, crafting, and teaching music), it wasn't a case of having regular days off each week. There were certain days or weekends during the year that I decided I would not work - Halloween, Christmas, New Year's, the two weekends a year when I attended science fiction conventions (whichever weekend in July we had the Calgary SF convention, and Thanksgiving weekend in October), and the two Saturdays each year when the local SCA branch put on feasts.

These home businesses were seasonal, which meant several months of being extremely busy, and then downtime. I tried to arrange things so absolutely everything wasn't happening at once, and still get some time off.

Time off turned out to be January and when we had summer heat waves (not much typing to be done in January and after the October-December madness I needed that month); the summer time off was because it's difficult to do needlepoint for 10 hours a day with sweaty fingers. I'd push it as hard as I could, though, to be ready for the fall and winter craft fairs and custom orders.

Things didn't always work as planned, of course. I remember the times when a typing client dropped by and found me in my kitchen apron, making desserts for the Harvest Feast or Silver Arrow feast, or already in my medieval costume. There was one occasion when the only possible drop-off was for the clients to come to the church hall with their papers. They got quite an eyeful, with several dozen people all wearing medieval outfits from a variety of cultures and centuries.
 
I'm with Vincour on one weekday, one weekend day. Working both weekend days can make you feel like a bit of a pariah, but weekdays are nice for giving you a bit of space. I used to work Friday-Tuesday, and the only thing I really miss about that was just how easy it is to get served and seated in a coffee shop on a Wednesday afternoon.

Sunday-Monday would probably be the ideal, because that way you're not left with Saturday as a worknight, which can take you back to the pariah-feeling thing, but I'll admit Friday-Saturday is tempting for the chance to spend Friday in some sunny beer garden, scoffing at all the worker ants who are at least four hours from freedom. (And if they scoff on Sunday, jokes on them, they're back to work in twelve hours.)
 
I find these non-weekend proposals fascinating. I can see the sanity in it, but Saturdays are sacred to me. I can't work on Saturdays, that's when I wake up in the morning to watch soccer and if my team is playing drink beer. Then later in the day my other team plays and there's more beer. Often I travel long distances to watch some of these games. Work would really get in the way of that. They basically schedule most of the games on weekends on purpose so that my soccer and other sporting needs can be satisfied to their proper extent! So changing up the formula by suddenly changing my free days would not only confuse the soccer gods, but also probably anger them.

On Sundays you have to rest from the saturday or at least attempt to get some stuff done. Or just lounge around in your pajamas and play video games and read a book. It's a lazy day, when it was first designed it was supposed to have a purpose, but now it's like kinda an extra day so I treat it as such. Nothing happens so you don't even have to treat it like a proper day. You can if you want to. Sunday is freedom day. Merge breakfast with lunch. Balance something on your chin. Whatever. It's sunday.

I would love to have Mondays off but not if I have to sacrifice Saturday or Sunday. Wednesdays I would consider as well, but then still.. Saturday or Sunday have to go? I don't see it happening. I understand the pros of the proposal, but the cons outweigh the pros heavily in my own personal take on it.
 
Back when I was younger and working as a junior engineer I worked Wednesdays to Sundays, so I got Mondays and Tuesdays off...It did killed my social life...
 
Well I work a standard 5 day week so weekends are off by default. I like this because everyone I know also has the same 5 day week.

If I were to take a day off during the week, I like to take it on Tuesdays. It turns Monday into a Friday and gives me a 3 day week for the rest of the week. Also if there is something urgent that needs to be done on Monday for Tuesday, it must be assigned to someone else because I'm not in tomorrow.

If I were to rearrange my entire work week I see no reason to change from the weekend. The only advantage of a day off during the week is that sometimes things are only open on weekdays, but that is so rare that it's really no bother to go during lunch hours, take a day off, or work from home. Everything is open all the time in London... Besides that, there are really only disadvantages to weekday days off: more traffic, friends are all busy, no football to watch...
 
Hard to tell.
The main thing around which my well-being is built is quiet (I think I could literally kill for silence), so the choice between week-end and week-days is more about balancing "if I work during weekend, being prevented to sleep because other people are partying means a terrible day at work" and "day off during the week means I'm more or less guaranteed having a pleasant evening with other people going to sleep soon".
Yes, noise is ruining my life THAT much. More than that actually.

Outside this main element, days off during the week-end means I can go see friends who don't work either (and that's most of them). Days off during the week means that I can actually do administrative stuff (there is several things I should have done monthes ago, like registering my car into my new city of residence, that I haven't done because the relevant administration isn't open during week-end, and I'm not going to burn a day off just to do this crap) and stores aren't crowded.
So in the end, yeah, if I was restricted to two days a week, I guess I would probably take sunday and monday.
 
Back
Top Bottom