Yesterday, I was looking at my September and October calendar, and it was stressing me out. I usually have one day that I protect quite fiercely: Saturday. Sunday to Friday is usually for work, study and writing, and around that there is managing the family, workouts and all the other things I have apparently decided I would like and have to do with my life. So Saturday has quietly become the day on which I am allowed not to improve anything. I don’t have to learn something, finish something, write something or move myself towards whatever the next thing is. It is just my Saturday.
Except, apparently, not in September and October. I looked at the calendar and every Saturday seemed to belong to something. My little brother is getting married. There are birthdays, family dinners, and a friend I need to see. Then there is our anniversary and a holiday. Individually, none of them bothers me. In fact, I want most of them there. That was what made my frustration slightly ridiculous.
Who exactly was I angry with?
My brother should obviously get married. Preferably with me there. My family deserves more than whatever pieces of time happen to remain after I have finished everything else, particularly when I spent so much of my twenties and thirties living in another country. And what kind of friendship am I maintaining if I live near someone and somehow manage to find time for everything except seeing them? I want to celebrate my anniversary with my husband. And I still need to go to the doctor. There wasn’t one thing on that calendar I could point at and say, you shouldn’t be here. Still, I looked at all those Saturdays and felt strangely deprived of them. The most interesting realisation was that nobody had taken them from me.
Nobody told me to build the rest of my week the way I have. Nobody told me that I must study alongside a full-time job, or write papers, or keep pursuing one ambition while already working on another. Nobody decided that Saturday should be protected. I did all that on my own. Then I filled the remaining space with people and things that matter to me, looked at the result and complained that I had no space.
Which reminded me of something I had heard recently on Instagram, “If you are frenzied, it’s on you.” Annoyingly, I couldn’t quite dismiss it. My first reaction was that I loved it because it made so much sense, but then, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?
Some people are overwhelmed because there is simply too much being asked of them. For example, a parent working full-time does not necessarily have the luxury of deciding that today will be peaceful. Neither does someone looking after an ageing parent, trying to pay bills that have become more expensive while their salary has not, or working under a manager who thinks every request is urgent.
Sometimes the problem really is the job or the circumstances. There could genuinely be too many things and not enough hours to do them. So no, I don’t think every overwhelmed person has simply failed to organise their life properly. But like always, I kept thinking about the sentence anyway. Because whether I like it or not, my calendar is still sitting there and it is still full. The more I tried to manage it, the harder it became to separate what had been demanded of me from what I had demanded of myself.
There are obligations we cannot simply remove. I have to go to work because the bills need paying. Children need looking after and the people we love sometimes need us at inconvenient times. Life does not rearrange itself around our preferred level of tranquillity. But mixed among those things are many others that have somehow acquired the same status.
The expectation that I should reply quickly and keep the house a certain way. I should exercise, I should be progressing in my career, I should pass my exam which means I should probably read more. I should be able to cook properly and forgetting to keep in touch seems to be the biggest sin these days. Oh yes, I should definitely make time for my marriage and I should use my weekend well. None of these things sounds unreasonable. In fact, that may be exactly the problem because it is easy to reject something ridiculous. But I can’t just reject ten perfectly reasonable things, can I?
We rarely sit down one morning and decide that we would like to construct an exhausting life. We seem to build one out of things that make sense individually. A little responsibility here, an ambition there. Someone we love and something we enjoy. Something that would be good for us and something we feel guilty for neglecting. Somewhere along the way, they stop feeling like choices. They become things we have to do. Which is strange, because many of them began with us.
Perhaps that is why “if you are frenzied, it’s on you” feels both wrong and difficult to throw away.
The word on makes it sound like blame, as though every exhausted person should look at themselves and admit that they caused their own exhaustion. I don’t think that survives contact with real life. But responsibility is not quite the same thing as blame.
If something was not created by us, can some part of what happens next still belong to us?
I don’t know and I am not sure my calendar gives me an easy answer either. Because what exactly should I do with it? I could protect every Saturday by telling my friend that I am too busy. I could choose to skip a family dinner because quite honestly, those are choices available to me. But that would mean pretending that protecting my time has no cost. Deep down inside, my friend, my family and my marriage matter a lot.
This is where “just say no” starts to feel almost as simplistic as “if you are frenzied, it’s on you.”
We talk about boundaries as though everything outside them is an intrusion. Sometimes it is. But sometimes the person on the other side of the boundary is someone we love, asking for a perfectly reasonable piece of our life. And most of the time, we want to give it to them.
Perhaps that is why this gets so difficult. The things competing for our time are not always important things versus unimportant things. Quite often, they are important things versus other important things. Career against family. Rest against friendship. Ambition against presence. Something we want for our future against someone we love right now.
Even within ourselves, the claims are real. I want a demanding career but I also want enough sleep. I want to be present in my marriage, to look after my body but also the time to think and write. I want to learn things. I want to see people I care about. And I would quite like some hours in which absolutely nobody wants anything from me. There is nothing excessive about any one of those things. But at the end of the day, my day is still twenty-four hours.
Maybe this isn’t really a time-management problem at all.
There is a problem in business that starts in almost exactly the same place. A company can make several products and every one of them can be profitable. Customers want all of them. The company would happily produce more of all of them but one machine can only run for so many hours. Suddenly, the question is no longer whether a product is worth making. They are all worth making. The question is what to do when several worthwhile things are competing for the same scarce resource.
In performance management, we call it a limiting factor. In throughput accounting, we look for the bottleneck: the thing whose limited capacity is restricting everything else. Once we figure out the bottleneck, we stop pretending everything can be produced. If machine hours are scarce, producing one product means those same machine hours cannot be used to produce another. So we look at what each product contributes for every hour of that scarce resource and decide how to use the hours we actually have. Not the hours we wish we had, but the hours we actually have.
Suddenly my calendar starts looking suspiciously like a badly managed factory. Because the scarce resource isn’t difficult to identify. Obviously, it is me. Or, more precisely, my time. My family wants some of it. My marriage wants some of it. Work wants some of it. Studying wants some of it. Writing wants some of it. My health wants some of it. My friends want some of it. And I want some of it too. When there are so many things that are important happening at the same time, the obvious answer would be to prioritise. Except I have been doing exactly that. Hours of planning my calendar and thinking of the best arrangement where I will be able to do all of them because my family, my husband and my ambitions are priorities, just as my health and the people I love. And somewhere among all of those, I would also like my own quiet Saturday to remain a priority.
We often talk about priorities as though the word itself solves scarcity. Decide what matters to you. Fine. But what happens when several things matter?
A factory has a wonderfully unemotional answer: Rank them.
If the bottleneck is machine hours, calculate what each product gives you for one hour of that machine and allocate the scarce hours to the highest return first. I wonder what would happen if I tried to do the same thing with my life.
Contribution per hour.
One hour studying.
One hour with my husband.
One hour having dinner with my family.
One hour with a friend I haven’t seen for months.
One hour exercising.
One hour doing absolutely nothing.
Which one gives me the highest return? The question becomes absurd almost immediately. What exactly is the return on dinner with my parents? How do I compare an hour spent studying for something that may change my career years from now with an hour spent with someone I love today? And where does rest go in the calculation? It produces almost nothing visible. There is no qualification at the end of it, no salary increase, no photograph, perhaps not even a particularly interesting memory. Yet remove enough of it and eventually everything else begins to deteriorate.
A business can choose a measure. Usually money gives us one common language in which different projects and products can at least be compared. But that is not how life works in reality. Maybe that is why managing time is so much harder than the phrase makes it sound. We are allocating a scarce resource without a common unit for measuring the things competing for it. Worse, every allocation has another cost.
If I give Saturday to my family, that Saturday cannot also belong to rest. If I choose to spend Sunday studying, those hours cannot simultaneously belong to my husband. If I protect the weekend entirely for myself, someone I love may get less of me.
Finance has a name for that too: opportunity cost. The cost of choosing one thing includes what we give up by not choosing the next best alternative. I find it amazing how we understand this quite easily with money. If I have €100 and spend €70, I don’t stand at the counter wondering why I cannot still spend the same €70 somewhere else.
But I seem perfectly capable of doing something similar with time. I can give Saturday away because the reason is important and still somehow feel that Saturday should remain available to me because rest is important too. Perhaps that is what I have been refusing to accept. A good use of a scarce resource is still a use of a scarce resource.
Spending three hours with someone I love doesn’t return those three hours to me simply because they were well spent. Something else didn’t happen, but that doesn’t make the choice wrong. It just means even good choices have opportunity costs, which sounds wonderfully sensible when we are talking about machines. I guess it is much less comfortable when the scarce resource is our life.
But if this is the life I chose, what exactly am I complaining about?
There is a particular kind of response we give people when their problems are the consequences of something they wanted.
You chose this.
We say it about careers, parenthood, relationships, businesses. Sometimes we say it to other people, and sometimes we say it to ourselves. You wanted the promotion, so of course there is more responsibility. You knew that by having children you would lose some of the freedom you had before. You were the one who signed up for the qualification or accepted the job. Nobody made you do all the things you wish you had now.
There is something undeniably fair about that. If I voluntarily put studying, writing and a demanding career into my life, it would be strange to behave as though some mysterious third party had imposed all of them upon me. If I keep choosing them tomorrow, and the day after that, then at some point I have to acknowledge that the tiredness they create is not entirely happening to me. I am participating in it.
There is another thought that makes complaining feel even more weird.
How many things exhausting us today are things we once desperately wanted? There was a time when the job did not exist yet. When the relationship had not happened. When we were trying to get into the university we now complain about attending, hoping for the promotion whose meetings now annoy us, saving for the house whose maintenance has become another weekend task. Sometimes we are standing inside an old wish and complaining about the furniture. That doesn’t necessarily make the complaint ungrateful. But it does make it interesting. Because apparently getting what we wanted did not remove the cost of wanting it.
I think we all knew that intellectually. Of course a better job might demand more from us. Of course relationships require time. Of course ambitions consume hours. But there seems to be a difference between accepting a cost when it is hypothetical and living inside it every Tuesday evening. Perhaps that is why you chose this is simultaneously true and strangely unsatisfying. Choosing something does not mean choosing only its pleasant parts but does choosing the whole thing mean we are no longer allowed to dislike some of them?
If someone loves being a parent and says they are exhausted, we don’t necessarily conclude that they regret having children. If someone loves their career but hates what this particular month is demanding of them, those two things can apparently exist together. I can want to write and still resent the evening I have to give up to do it. I can love my family and still want the Saturday they are occupying. So perhaps complaining is not always evidence that we made the wrong choice.
But then there is an uncomfortable limit somewhere. Because if I complain every week that studying is taking over my life, while voluntarily continuing to study every week, at what point does “this is hard” quietly become I refuse to acknowledge the price of what I want? Honestly, I can’t tell where that line is.
But why did we choose so much in the first place?
There is another phrase we use that I had never thought very hard about before.
I have a life.
Usually, we know roughly what someone means by it. They have friends, go places and have plans for the weekend. They exercise, have hobbies, and are probably working productively towards something. There are people to see and things happening. Their life looks full. But then what do we call the person who finishes work, goes home, eats dinner and spends the evening on the sofa?
What about someone who doesn’t particularly want the next promotion? Someone who has no interest in starting a business, studying for another qualification, running a marathon or turning a hobby into something more productive? Maybe they see their friends occasionally. Maybe they spend most weekends at home. Maybe Saturday arrives and they do almost nothing with it.
Do they have less of a life?
It sounds ridiculous when we put it that plainly. And yet I think there is something in the way we talk about living that quietly suggests they do. We should make the most of our time. We should get out there. We should see the world. We should challenge ourselves. We should maintain our friendships. We should take care of our bodies. We should keep learning. We should progress. We should make memories. We only live once, after all. Which is a strange argument, because it can apparently justify almost anything except doing very little.
There is something admirable about a full life. Someone who is curious, ambitious, surrounded by people, physically active, constantly learning and making things happen appears to be using their life. I understand the appeal because I am drawn to it too. But I wonder when full became confused with good.
Imagine someone who genuinely wants less. They work enough to support the life they want, but they aren’t particularly interested in moving much further up. They come home and have dinner. Maybe they watch the same programme every evening. They don’t have five hobbies. Their weekends aren’t particularly interesting to describe. There are days when they accomplish absolutely nothing. And they are happy.
So what exactly is missing?
Perhaps they have simply answered a question the rest of us are still trying to answer: How much is enough? Or perhaps that is too generous because a smaller life can hide things too. We can call it contentment when really we are afraid to try. We can say we don’t want more when wanting more would expose us to failure. We can make peace sound profound because it is easier than admitting that we have stopped stretching ourselves.
How would we know the difference?
Perhaps the ambitious version has its own disguise too. We can call it growth when we are terrified of standing still. We can call it curiosity when we don’t know how to be alone on an empty Saturday. We can call it making the most of life when we have simply become very good at finding the next thing that prevents us from asking whether the things we already have are enough.
The person on the sofa might be wasting their potential or they might be completely content. The person with the packed calendar might be building an extraordinary life or they might simply be unable to stop.
Maybe the question isn’t whether we should live fully. Maybe it is what we mean by full.
A calendar can be full, but a life can also contain very little and somehow feel full. Maybe that is what makes the original sentence so difficult for me.
“If you are frenzied, it’s on you.”
Maybe sometimes it is. But knowing that doesn’t tell us what to remove. It doesn’t tell us which ambition is worth the tiredness, which relationship deserves the Saturday, which obligation is genuinely ours, which one we invented, or whether wanting an afternoon to ourselves means we have finally recognised a limit or simply don’t feel like paying the price of something we still say we want. It doesn’t tell us whether the answer is to become better at carrying a full life or to stop insisting that a good one needs to be so full in the first place.
Quite honestly, I still have no idea what I am going to do about September and October.
My brother is still getting married. My friends are still my friends. My family is still my family. My husband is still the person I want to spend my life with. My work, my writing and my ambitions still matter to me. The strange thing is that if you asked me which one isn’t a priority, I wouldn’t know what to give you. I just know that Saturday morning will come, something I care about will be sitting in it, and some small part of me will still think:
But when do I get my Saturday back?
