Weekend Projects

Even the most urbane professional can often be found doing very earthy things on the weekend: tinkering in the basement, tending to a backyard project, or building out a new front porch.  Not me, lately.  All the weekends these last two months have involved one or more of the following:

• Doing my taxes
• Putting together a report for my community association (big release forthcoming!)
• Updating my lesson plans and spreadsheets for the quant tools class I teach at Penn each summer
• Grinding out reports for clients that I ran out of time during the week to complete
• Catching up on correspondence with professional colleagues who I try to stay in touch with
• Attending networking events 

The first three have meant heavy doses of spreadsheets, analysis, and report production.  The last three are basically me extending my work week into the weekend because there aren't enough hours in the day during the work week.

The beauty of doing handyman stuff on the weekends is that it's a change of pace from your 9 to 5.  There's also a sense of accomplishment when you can identify a project, commence work, and bring it to completion.  Plus many people enjoy the actual tasks, whether it's gardening or cars or home improvements.

I actually enjoy spreadsheets, analysis, and report production.  (I'm pretty weird like that.)  But going from a full work week of doing a lot of that to grinding out more of the same on the weekend for 8 to 10 straight weeks, I'd say it's time to find a different kind of weekend project.  Thankfully, my taxes are done, my community association report is done, and my class prep is done.  It looks like it's time for a Home Depot run.