The Three-Day Weekend

Sometimes people blame time for the amount of things they get done. "If I had more time, I'd be way more productive." Three-day weekends exist to show that, for the most part, this is a lie.

On three-day weekends, you have more time and do less. I'm fairly regimented in my approach to the week: Monday through Friday I have class and take of homework, Saturday I rest, and Sunday I go to church, hang out with people, and get a good start to my upcoming week. But when we have Friday off, I'm confused. Is Friday a work day or a play day? If it's a play day, then is Saturday still a day of rest or can that take the load for some of the homework that I need to get done? And even if I count Friday as a half-work day, then I probably won't feel very rested by the end of the weekend.

Here's how it's playing out now. This weekend is UF's homecoming, so we didn't have class today. I woke up around 10:30, had breakfast by 11, and got some things done by the time I was ready for lunch. By "things", I mean clearing my inbox (since I use Gmail, I can "archive" emails so they still exist but aren't in my face all the time, leaving my inbox with messages that I still want to respond to) and replying to a Facebook message. I read about ten pages of my assignment for Medieval Lit and felt accomplished because the story is in English that's really similar to modern-day language, so it won't be hard to read when I do commit time to it.

And that's it. I couldn't be bothered to make lunch, so I walked to Papa John's for pizza and accidentally saw five minutes of the homecoming parade. I played racquetball with Dan. And then my fun began and I went to a guy's house for dinner, then to somebody's birthday party.

So now I'm unsure where I stand with my workload. By the time I decide that I should stop trying to work and just relax instead, the weekend will be over and I'll have to lurch back into school mode.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not advocating that we have class to avoid this problem. I'm more lamenting the presence of transaction costs in vacation time. I hope that's the right word. I mean that students can't fully enjoy the time because, in its novelty, vacation time is wastefully allocated.

Not every break is this way. I measure time by weeks because my schedule repeats weekly. When spring break comes and we have a whole week off, it's easy to adjust to because there's one whole week which you can wipe off the map. With only one day, though, the week's rhythm is thrown off. For example, I realistically am too busy Friday and Saturday night to have time to blog, but I like to post a new entry at least every two days, so Friday afternoon when I have some free time I'll blog, or something. But today I let my time slip away because when you don't have class you assume the day will last forever, and now it's 3 am and I'm tired.

But it's a three-day weekend!!