Book the thing. The weekend won't organise itself.

Commentary.

Most weekends go like this. Nobody makes a plan on Thursday. Saturday starts slowly, some admin happens, some scrolling happens, there's a vague intention to do something later, and then it's Sunday evening and the honest answer to "what did you do?" is "not much".

Nobody chose that. It's just what happens in the absence of a choice.

One booked thing

The intervention is embarrassingly small: have one thing in the diary, booked, with other people involved.

Not a full itinerary. One anchor. A walk that starts at nine. Five-a-side. A trip to something two hours away. Anything that has a time attached and someone else expecting you.

The anchor does two things. It stops the drift directly, for the hours it occupies. And it reorganises the hours around it — you get up at a reasonable time because you're leaving at nine, so the morning exists, so the afternoon exists.

Why it has to involve someone else

Because a plan with only you in it gets cancelled by you, silently, at eight in the morning, with no consequences.

A plan with another man in it happens. Not because of pressure, but because letting someone down is a real cost and lying in bed is a vague benefit.

This is also, incidentally, the entire mechanism behind why people with a training partner train and people without one mostly don't.

Go further than is convenient

The trips people remember are almost never the convenient ones. Two hours away, somewhere you haven't been, isn't much more effort than forty minutes away and it's a categorically different day.

A weekend can contain a genuine trip. Most men act as though anything more than an afternoon requires a holiday.

Leave the phone in the bag

Not for wellness reasons. Because a day where you checked your phone eleven times isn't stored as one day — it's stored as eleven fragments, and it disappears from memory almost immediately.

Take photographs. Then put it away.

The honest bit

Nobody looks back and wishes the Saturdays had been more restful. The restful ones don't register at all; there's nothing there to register.

What you get back, years later, is the cold walk, the drive, the game, the trip somebody organised badly. All of which required one person to send one message on a Thursday.

Be the one who sends it.

Need something to do with the kids that costs nothing? WhackAWoke.com — a sister site — is a free browser game with no ads and no download.