179. There Are Only 15 Summer Weekends. Are You Wasting Them...or Ruining Them Trying Not To?

15 weekends of summer. How are you spending them?

Laurie counted them. There are 15 summer weekends this year — and the moment she did that, something shifted. Not because it changed anything. Because finite time does something very particular to high-achieving women: it turns enjoyment into management.

This episode started as a thought on a walk and became something much bigger: an honest look at busyness as a drug, the habit of earning rest before allowing it, and why the discomfort of doing nothing might be the most useful information you get all summer.

Laurie shares what she's been working through in real time: the Sunday she spent doing absolutely nothing while Mike was out of town, the guilt that followed, and the moment a quote from a keynote at Craft + Commerce hit her in the chest and put language to something she'd been feeling her whole life.

Practical, honest, and a little uncomfortable in the best way. This one is for any woman who has ever felt like she needed to earn the weekend before she was allowed to enjoy it.

What we cover

• Why counting the summer weekends changes the way you experience them...and not always for the better
• Parkinson's Law: why finite time makes us cram instead of savor, and what that costs us
• The two problems with finite time: cramming it full, or feeling guilty for not cramming it full
• The pattern Laurie has been running her whole life — Saturdays off, Sundays working — and why she never questioned it until now
• The Sunday she did absolutely nothing, felt guilty about it, and what that revealed
• Jay Papasan's keynote at Craft + Commerce and the quote that stopped her cold: "If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress." — Ian Simpkins
• Why busyness works like a drug, and what the cost of that addiction actually is
• Busyness as a hiding place: why staying in motion postpones the questions, the decisions, and the version of yourself that has things to deal with
• The empty calendar question: if every obligation disappeared tomorrow, what would bubble up for you in the quiet?
• Three things Laurie has been doing this summer — imperfectly — to practice actual rest
• Why rest is a skill, not a reward
• The question underneath all of it: who am I when I'm not busy?

The three practices

1. Name it when the pattern shows up. Not out loud, not dramatically. Just notice: I'm reaching for my laptop because I feel like I should have something to show for this afternoon. That's it. See it.

2. Give the guilt somewhere to land. The guilt isn't about the rest. It's about the belief underneath: I'm only as valuable as what I produce. When the guilt arrives, get curious. Ask it: what are you trying to protect me from? What do you think will happen if I just sit here?

3. Start smaller than you think you need to. Not the whole weekend. Twenty minutes. No phone, no task, no optimization. Just twenty minutes with no agenda. Then notice: how long after those twenty minutes does it take before you reach for something to do?

Quotable moments

"The moment something becomes finite, you stop enjoying it and start managing it."

"At some point the weekend becomes a production — and the question becomes, is this still a weekend, or is it just a different kind of work?"

"If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress." — Ian Simpkins, shared by Jay Papasan at Craft + Commerce

"The rest was always conditional. The play was always something I had to earn first."

"The discomfort of being unproductive feels worse to me than the exhaustion of being overworked."

"Busyness isn't just a habit. It can be a hiding place."

"The busyness feels productive. But what it's actually producing is distance...from the questions, from the stillness, from the version of yourself that knows things you're not ready to deal with."

"The rest isn't indulgent. It's information."

"Rest is a skill. The first few times you try it, it's probably going to feel awful."

"Who am I when I'm not busy? That's one of the most important questions a woman in midlife can ask herself."

Resources + links mentioned

• Last week's episode: Shoot Your Shot — Even When You'd Rather Look Away
• Apply for the BEST LIFE Mastermind
• Book a 15-minute call with Laurie

If this episode resonated, share it with the woman in your life who needs to hear it. And if you haven't already — subscribe, leave a five-star review, and know that Laurie reads every single one.

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Transcript

0:00

Quick question before we get started. When is the last time you did absolutely nothing and didn't feel guilty about it? Not a nap between obligations, not scrolling your phone while technically resting, in air quotes, but nothing. You just sat somewhere, let the time pass, and felt okay about it. If you're like me, you might have trouble remembering how long ago because it's been a really long time. Or if the question itself made you a little uneasy, then this episode's for you, and honestly, it's for me, too. I'll tell you why once we get into it. Real quick, before we get into today's episode, I wanna talk to you about the Best Life Mastermind. For years, the coaching industry has given high-achieving women a choice, invest in your career or invest in your life, executive coaching or life coaching, leadership at work or clarity at home, as if our lives were separated into two different parts. Here's what nobody has said out loud. You cannot separate the leader from the life she's living. If she's burned out at home, she's gonna be burned out at work. If she doesn't know what she wants from her life, then she doesn't fully know what she wants from her career either. The Best Life Mastermind is built on a different premises, personal leadership development for the whole woman. Because the clearest, most fulfilled, most purposeful version of you, she shows up everywhere: at work, at home, in every room you walk into. I want to invite you to join me as a founding member in the Best Life Mastermind. Here's what's included. Two in-person luxury retreats at award-winning destinations, Sun Valley, Idaho in September and the incredible Civana Wellness Resort Spa in Arizona in February. All accommodations, meals, and spa appointments will be included. Monthly personal leadership coaching calls and an intimate private community of like-minded women doing this work together, hosted off of social media and away from the noise. Nine months, 10 women, two in-person retreats, monthly coaching calls, everything included except your travel. Applications open right now. Click the link in the show notes Now, let's get into today's episode. Hey, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. I cannot believe it has just been a week since I last recorded an episode. We are in those dog days of summer that feel really long, but the weeks go by so fast, which is kinda what I wanna talk to you about today. Um, this idea actually came up for me on a walk a couple of weeks ago, and I feel like it's been coming up pretty much every Monday since. It's this idea of summer weekends, of all things,. There are, I counted, there are 15 of them this year. So a little longer than normal because of the way that Memorial Day and Labor Day on the calendar work, but 15. And there's something about that finite number that does something very particular to high-achieving women, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're also gonna talk about busyness as a drug, which might sound dramatic until you realize that you might actually be addicted to it, and what it means to earn rest. I think a lot of us have been doing that our whole lives, and we've never once questioned whether it is a habit or a behavior or a system worth keeping. So let's get into it. We have 15 summer weekends this year. I know because I actually counted them on the calendar, and once I did that, I feel like something shifted in me. Not because it's just that summer weekends are different from regular weekends. They're not. I mean, they're the same two days, but they kind of are, right? Because the days are longer. There's a different energy. A lot of us will try and leave work early on Friday afternoon, or maybe even work remotely on Friday, leave town on Thursday Maybe drive home early Monday morning so you can be in the office on Monday, or maybe you even postpone that until Tuesday. But it, they're just, they feel a little different than regular weekends. There's less rigidity, right? I mean, there's less of the relentlessness of the school year schedule. Does that make sense? It's almost like we're giving ourselves more permission somehow to do the things that we actually wanna do. Like, summer is the time to relax and enjoy, and it just has a different feel than all of the other weekends of the year. The problem is that the moment something becomes finite or, you know, only a certain number of them, in this case 15 summer weekends, something interesting happens. You stop enjoying them because you start managing them. It becomes this challenge of how much can you actually pack into a weekend because there's only so many of them. If you're like me, you've got an entire list of things that you like to do in the summer, whether that's go to the rodeo or go to the lake or have a barbecue, play bocce ball, play pickleball, go play tennis, go to the lake, water-ski, go to the baseball game, do a family road trip. Whatever fills your bucket for the summer, there are a lot of things that we try to jam-pack into summer, especially when we realize that there are only 15 of them. And at the time I'm recording this, we're already four weekends down, so you even have less. I'm not trying to put panic in you. I'm not trying to like create this, uh, crazy urgency that doesn't actually exist, but it's, it's something that you really need to start thinking about. It's, it's almost like Do you ever get the feeling when you're on vacation, and instead of being present for what it is that you're doing, you're already thinking about, "Oh, there's only, there's only five days left. There's only three days left"? And you start almost pre-grieving about the ending of it? Or the last hour of a really good dinner party when you can feel that goodness slipping away, and you're kind of grasping at it instead of just sitting in it. Like, you're, you're thinking about it ending even before it does. I don't know if this makes sense, but I feel this in my bones because I have been known to do this. And any time I figure out that there is only a certain amount of time to do something, I am on high alert to make sure that I am squeezing out every possible moment of it 'cause I, like, I just don't wanna miss it. Here's the problem with that, though. In, in fact, there, there's probably two problems that are created when we talk about finite time, or in this case, 15 weekends. Problem one is you try and cram too much in, right? Like, as much as humanly possible. There's actually a, a concept that talks about this, and it's called Parkinson's law, and it is this idea that the work expands to fill the time available for doing the work The reverse of that is also true, that when time compresses, we, we try to compress everything we want into it. It's kind of why when you are going on vacation, you can knock out three weeks worth of work in just the, you know, the three or four days that you have left before vacation. You're very, very productive. Or if you, if you look at your calendar, I do this all the time, and you think, "Okay, I have an hour to get to that lunch, or I have an hour to get to that meeting, so that means naturally I can go to the post office, and I can get gas, and I can run to the bank." And you start doing all of these chores because they're all on the way. It would be s- foolish to not actually take advantage of time instead of getting there early and being there too early. Surely I can do all of these things. And invariably for me, I'm either rushing in at the last minute, totally hectic because I am cutting it really close, or I'm like five minutes late, which is ridiculous because I had an entire hour to get there, but I over-committed I overshot how much I could actually accomplish in that amount of time. So that's Parkinson's Law. How it relates to what we're talking about today is this feeling that a summer weekend almost becomes a production, right? You're planning and optimizing. You're scheduling all the fun. You're fitting in the hike, and the farmers market, and the dinner reservation, and the time with the kids, and the time with your spouse, and the time alone, and the home project, and... right? But that was almost verbatim, like, my schedule this past Saturday. Obviously, no time with the kids, but everything else. So much to do, so little time. And when you try and cram all that in, then at some point the question becomes, is this still a weekend, or is it just a different kind of work that happens two days out of the week instead of five days out of the week? So that's problem one, is that we, we just, we try and do too much with the amount of time that we have. Problem two is if you don't cram it in and try and get everything done, then you feel guilty about it, right? Like you wasted the weekend. Like this finite thing is slipping by, and you're not doing enough with it. And here's what gets really interesting, and maybe even a little uncomfortable for women like us, is because of that guilt that we feel if we just decide to not do anything on Sunday, to grab a book and go read it by the pool, to take a nap, like do nothing, maybe not even cook dinner. Let's do takeout tonight. I understand we've been home all weekend. We've got a refrigerator full of food, but maybe I just want to cook. But when we do that, then we feel super guilty about it Because we feel like we should have done more with the time that we had. And that's not only applicable to summer weekends, that's, that's actually a pattern. That is something we've been running for most of us our entire lives And it's related to something else I've been thinking about and sitting with as it relates to kind of summer but also not summer, but this whole idea of earning our rest. I've noticed that for most of my life I would take Saturdays off, run errands, do fun things, schedule a dinner out, go shopping, whatever it was. I would almost always do that on a Saturday. But then on Sunday, I'd work. Not because someone made me, not because there was a specific emergency. I mean, even in law school, I would typically take Saturdays off, even if we were in the midst of finals. There, there was something sacred to me about having a break on Saturday And then I would always get back to work on Sunday. And I don't know if it was because of that bag of work sitting in the hallway every time I walked by it, it just made me feel more and more guilty that I hadn't actually done it But it was like I had to have something to show for the weekend. What's really interesting is for the past six years that I've been building this business, I can count on one hand how many weekends I have actually taken all the way off. Two of them have happened recently, which is why I'm starting to think about this a little bit more. This past weekend, Mike was out of town. I spent a lot of time on Sunday doing absolutely nothing. I'm gonna be honest with you. I felt like I'd squandered an opportunity Isn't that interesting? Instead of allowing myself and my body and my mind the downtime and the, the time to rest and decompress, I felt really guilty about it. Because I'm, I'm looking around the house, uh, w- there are all these projects that need to get done. I am still writing my book. I've got a deadline, a, a sort... I have a very soft deadline. I, I'd like to have the first draft of the book done by the end of Q2, which is coming up here very quickly There are many things I could have done, and I took Sunday off, and I felt really guilty about it. I really did. I just, ugh. What I have come to realize, though, is I have been doing a version of this same thing my whole life. The rest was always conditional. It's almost like the play or the fun was something I always had to earn first. And I'm finally at the point in my business and my life where that's no longer necessary. I've got the, the systems dialed in, and I don't have to spend every Saturday and Sunday working to stay afloat. Still, not working on the weekends feels harder to me than carving out time to work on the weekends. Isn't that crazy? I think it's because at least when I was working, I knew what I was doing, right? I was, I was being productive. I was being useful. There's a discomfort that comes with being unproductive That feels in some way to me worse than the exhaustion of being overworked or overwhelmed. It's crazy, right? Does, does this sound familiar? At Craft and Commerce two weeks ago now, one of the presenters, Jay Papasan, was giving a keynote and referenced a quote on the screen that he was talking about. The quote is If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress." It's attributed to Ian Simpkins. Man, I felt that. If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress". I took a picture of it. I immediately wrote it down because I completely relate to that. I understood what the quote was talking about, that busyness is a drug. Because here's the thing about drugs, they work, right? We take them, we consume them to relieve some sort of pain or discomfort. They give you something tangible, this idea of a relief or a reward. In my case, with busyness being the drug, it's this feeling of accomplishment. And yet, almost across the board, drugs come with some sort of costs, right? The cost of busyness for us, for women like me, high achievers, the ones who don't ever feel like they've earned a beat, Rest stops feeling like rest. It feels more like a problem to be solved. There are a lot of threads that are running through here, and this is quickly becoming a stream of consciousness episode, but there's a piece of it that I keep asking myself, and I think it's valid for you to ask yourself too, this question of when did you, and I meaning me and, and you meaning you, when did you decide that your worth was tied to your output? Because somewhere along the line, somewhere along the way, we made that decision, whether it was consciously or unconsciously, whether we were aware of it or not. If you're anything like me, you never questioned it. Instead, we absorbed this idea that idle hands are the devil's workshop, that a woman who isn't producing something is a woman who isn't contributing, that rest is a reward for work, not just something that you can do when you need it or when you want to, which keeps us in this busyness loop. So we keep working to earn the rest. We spend all week working to earn the weekend. We push through the first part of the vacation so that we can earn the second part of the vacation. The, the morning to earn the afternoon so that... I, I mean, it just... Think about it. These patterns are playing out over and over and over again. Even, even the, the big one, which is decades of being in the workforce and decades of labor so that we can earn retirement. It's showing up everywhere. And the rest when it finally comes doesn't feel like rest at all, does it? It feels like a different kind of work. It feels like guilt. I think it's because busyness isn't just a habit. It can be a hiding place. Here's what I mean by that. When you're busy, you don't have to sit with the question of what you actually want. You just have to get focused on the next thing that you have to do, which means you don't have to face the discomfort of not knowing what you want to do next. You don't have to be present in the quiet moments where all of those inconvenient truths tend to surface. If you're just focused on doing the next thing, then you don't have to ask yourself the tough questions Right? I mean, busyness is very good at drowning out those 2:00 AM questions. Not solving them Helping with the rumination. As long as you stay in motion, you can postpone the tough conversation, you can postpone the decision, you can postpone pretty much e- uh, there are a lot of things that you can put off. That's one of the areas that I find that high-achieving women are oftentimes the hardest to coach. Not because they don't know on some level that something needs to change, but because the busyness is so well defended. It is rewarded in this society. These are women who have real responsibilities, real obligations, real work that genuinely needs to get done. So the busyness is rational and rewarded, applauded, validated. There's so much approval with, "Look at your production. Look at what you're doing." So it makes it very difficult to see that it's also a coping mechanism, right? If you are busy, you don't have to deal with the big things that are happening in your life that make you uncomfortable. Again, whether that's a conversation, whether that is a relationship, whether that It's something to do with work. It could be something to do with your personal life.... if you're busy though, you're busy. You don't have time for that. You'll just, you'll, you'll deal with those emotions later. You just press those down. You just stuff them down And isn't it interesting that there always comes a time where the, the emotions come back up We don't deal with them for a long, long time, but then they just come back up, usually at a very inopportune time. So I'm wondering if you're seeing yourself in this at all. If I ask you this question, I wonder what your answer would be. Think about if your calendar was suddenly empty. Every obligation, every meeting, every commitment just gone, just vanished.\ So your whole calendar is empty: what would bubble up for you in the quiet? What would you feel with all of that open time? How would you wanna spend it? Do you know? Would you pick up your phone and start scrolling to look for answers? Would you defer to your spouse or your kids to see what they needed help with, so that you could fill up your calendar? Would you volunteer for extra work projects? Or would you give yourself the time to just sit and think and be? Whatever came up for you, oftentimes that's what is been keeping you busy. And I'm not saying that to be harsh, I'm saying it because I've lived it I still live it on the weekends when I can't quite convince myself to put the laptop away. The busyness feels productive, but what it's actually producing is distance from questions and stillness, and from a version of myself that knows that there are some things out there that I need to deal with, that I should deal with, that I'm not ready to deal with. And here's the cost of that distance That I have learned over five decades of life with a repeatable pattern that is very obvious. The longer you keep yourself busy enough to avoid the questions, the longer it actually takes to figure out what you want from your life, from this season of life, for the next 20 to 30 years. The rest shouldn't be deemed indulgent. It's necessary. It's information This is where I feel like I've unpacked this whole suitcase full of truths and it's like, okay, well, what do we do with this now? Because I wanna be practical, because I know telling a high-achieving woman to just rest is about as useful as telling someone with insomnia to, like, you know, "You just need to go to sleep. It's okay." 'Cause you can't force it, right? The harder you try, the worse it gets. Here's what's been working for me this summer. A little imperfectly, but I'm, I'm working through it, um, because, you know, I'm, I'm going through a lot of this stuff in real time just like you are. The difference between the two of us is I have a microphone and I talk into it and I spill my guts and, and, uh, you listen to it. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. But here's what I've been doing this summer. First, when the pattern shows up, I've been naming it. Not to shame myself for it, but just to see it. And, and this doesn't have to be out loud. You don't have to make a big spectacle out of it. You just have to notice it. Like, for instance, I notice that I'm reaching for my laptop because I feel like I should have something to show for this afternoon. That's it. It can be just something you think. It can be something that you write down if you're, if you're somebody who likes to put pen to paper. But noticing it. Noticing the behavior and then naming it. And then number two, I guess this is a three-part, three things I've been doing. Number two is I give the guilt somewhere to land. I know that sounds funny, but the guilt that shows up when I'm resting isn't actually about the rest. It's about the belief that's underneath the rest, right? This idea that I'm only as valuable as what I produce. So when the guilt shows up, the first thing I do is name it, and then I get curious about it, and I've started asking myself, Self, what are you trying to protect me from? What do you think will happen if I just sit here?" And then it's almost comical. It's like, well, of course nothing will happen. Yes, you deserve your rest. You've had a big week, and even if you didn't have a big week, you still deserve your rest. The noticing it is so important though. That's, that's definitely the first step. And then the last step is I've been starting smaller than I think I need to. Here's what I mean by that. I don't have to take the entire weekend off and lay on the couch reading fiction books to practice rest. I can start with 20 minutes that belong entirely to me. Not on my phone, not looking at a to-do list, not making a to-do list, no task that I'm accomplishing, nothing I'm trying to optimize for, but 20 minutes where the only thing on the agenda is that there is no agenda. Sometimes that means I go take a nap. Even if I'm not falling asleep in 20 minutes, I can do a meditation that really grounds myself. It's amazing what 20 minutes can do. And then after the 20 minutes, I start noticing what comes up. How long after the 20 minutes over does it take for me to reach for something to do? Or has the urge to do something passed and I feel good about doing something that I wanna do or that isn't productive or doesn't seem like it's benefiting the family or the yard, or it's not attributed to work? Ultimately, here's the truth about rest that nobody talks about, is it's a skill, right? Like, like any skill, it gets easier with practice, and the first few times you actually try to rest, it's probably gonna feel awful. Not painful, but just uncomfortable, right? Because you're gonna feel unproductive, and when you feel unproductive, then you're gonna feel guilty, and when you feel guilty, then you might also vaguely feel like you're failing at something. What's interesting though is I've noticed that on the other side of that discomfort is the version of myself that has actually recovered enough to think clearly, right? To hear the quiet question, to finally answer it honestly. So for me, these 15 weeks of summer or however many weekends we have left aren't about cramming as many activities in as possible. It's more about understanding that if I wanna rest this weekend, just because it's a summer weekend and just because there are a finite number of them, doesn't mean that I've wasted the weekend. In fact, it could be the most important investment you make in yourself this entire summer. Isn't what you do, but it's about how much time you give yourself to just be, to rest and recover. Before I completely wrap this up, I wanna say one more thing. If you're like me and you are someone who has been running at this pace for a long time, and I know a lot of you have, the idea of slowing down probably feels somewhere between absolutely uncomfortable, completely terrifying, you know, it's just no, hard pass, immediately no. And it's not, that's not because you don't want to. It's because you're not entirely sure what would happen if you stopped. You're not entirely sure who you are when you're not busy. And that question, the one of who am I when I'm not busy, is one of the most important questions a woman in midlife can ask herself. It's also one of the central questions that we work on inside the Best Life Mastermind. Not from a hammock, although there are plenty of opportunities to relax and enjoy, but we're in the work, we're in community. And when you do it with other women who are experiencing the same feelings and emotions and asking the same questions It's amazing how validated you feel. We've all, many of us have had the same conditioning. We all feel guilty about resting. We don't need to anymore, though. So if that sounds like the kind of space you need or you want, applications are still open. There's a link in the show notes. Even if the mastermind isn't right for you right now, there's a weekend coming up. Maybe not tomorrow, depending on when you listen to this episode, maybe, maybe four days from now, but there's a weekend coming up. Do yourself a favor and take 20 minutes this weekend. Put nothing on the calendar for one block of time. Put your phone away. Put the obligations away. See what happens. See what surfaces for you in the quiet. I think you might be surprised about what's been waiting there. If this has resonated with you at all, will you please let me know? I know I'm on this journey to make my own midlife the best life it can be, and I know many of you are as well, but let's do this work together. Let me know. I received a lot of feedback from last week's episode. If you haven't listened to that, it's a good one. I'll put a clickable link in the show notes for that one as well. But let me know. If this is resonating with you, I'd love to hear from you, and if it's something that one of your friends needs to know, will you do me a favor and, and share the episode with her? That would, that would mean so much to me. Thank you so much for being here today. I will see you right back here next week when the School of Midlife is back in session. Till then, take good care. Thank you so much for listening to the School of Midlife podcast. It means so much to have you here each week. If you enjoyed this episode, could you do me the biggest favor and help us spread the word to other midlife women? There are a couple of easy ways for you to do that first. And most importantly, if you're not already following the show, would you please subscribe? That helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. Second, if you'd be so kind to leave us a five-star rating, that would be absolutely incredible. And finally, I personally read each and every one of your reviews. So if you take a minute and say some nice things about the podcast, well, that's just good karma. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you right back here. Next week when the School of Midlife is back in session until then take good care.