Though it never feels long enough, the weekend as we know it is is the biggest break between work and rest that we’ve ever had
The practice of downing tools and logging off on Saturday and Sunday has only existed for little more than a century. In post-Industrial Revolution Britain, workers were given Sundays off for religious reasons, with the unofficial but widely adopted practice of Saint Monday – taking the Monday off to recover from the previous day’s excesses – shaping the pattern of the working week.
Campaigns from various organisations, including trade unions, religious bodies, and temperance groups, pushed for a more formalised break in the week to encourage industriousness, allow for better attendance at church, and to “advance working class respectability” with elevated leisure pursuits, leading to the introduction of a half day on Saturdays.
Britain adopted the full 48-hour weekend in the 1930s, around the same time the concept gained traction in the US. Henry Ford started shutting his factories on Saturdays and Sundays in 1926 – not out of generosity, but to encourage consumer spending, particularly on his cars, by giving people the time to actually use them.
Though not everyone shares Saturday and Sunday as their days off, like people who work shift patterns or rotas, the weekend is an example of a network good, something that becomes more valuable the more people adopt or use it. As researchers Cristobal Young and Chaeyoon Lim state in their paper Time as a Network Good, “the essential characteristic of the weekend is not just the having of a day off but rather that other people have the day off.”
For author Alex Mayyasi, weekends as we’ve come to know them are under threat, because people feel busier than ever. “That’s partly because the market has delivered us so many products and activities to spend our leisure time consuming,” he writes. “But many workers have also lost the clear demarcation between work and time off.” An always-on work culture, the accessibility provided by technology, the fetishisation of busyness and the fixation on maxxing are eroding the shared social time of the weekend as those days simply become time to do more.
For every person that rages when a work request gets pinged over on a Saturday, there’s another who welcomes that encroachment on their weekend, whether they’re working to climb the ladder or to flex their success on the ‘gram. There are also a lot of people who structure their careers in such a way that negates the weekend entirely – freelancers are able to choose their own working hours and multi-hyphenates (who don’t have a singular job title) are redefining how careers, and ergo work schedules, can look.
Emma Gannon, a multi-hyphenate and author of The Multi-Hyphen Method, supports this, saying that “being a multi-hyphenate is not a ‘better’ way of working (it’s hard! It can be overwhelming! It can take many wrong turns!) but it is a way of making a living that can work really well for many people.” Lola Adewuya, an experience designer who also writes about the future of work, goes a step further, advocating for what she calls a ‘self-centred career’. Framing your work like this, where you pick projects based on what serves you and the returns you want to get, such as flexibility, growth, lifestyle security and community, is the best way to thrive in a system that’s designed to extract your talent, time and energy.
Choosing selfishness rather than buying into the established idea of what a career can look like and how it can function, means you prioritise your time over a shared schedule, like the network good of the weekend. As the world changes rapidly and the future becomes more uncertain, working patterns and career paths will only continue to adapt – just look at the growing calls for a four-day week – so the weekend could be changing too.
