I don’t know about you, but my weekends are often just an extension of my work week. While I might not be working, per se, there are tasks that assume their place on Saturday and Sunday, leaving very little room for anything else. Having a home means keeping up with said home, and that includes laundry, mopping, dishes, grocery shopping, etc. These tasks have to be done through rain, snow, sleet, or hail.

I decided about a month ago to declare Mondays “Offline Mondays”. I know an independent artist who works in a cafe/pub on Friday afternoons, and another who is completely offline on Fridays.  Now that I’ve tried it, I am convinced this is the way I must do things. Here’s why I love it:

• When I’m online, I often have about 5 tabs in Firefox open, Illustrator and Photoshop running, and a handful of chat windows asking for replies. Being the obsessive consummate multitasker, I actually enjoy this environment. Tons to do, flying a mile-a-minute through windows and screens and programs, making it all happen. Offline Mondays, sans computer, I am able to let my brain stop and breathe, and after about 11:00 on Monday morning, ideas I’ve been packing into the back of my mind begin to gingerly emerge. Baby ideas that aren’t strong enough to demand attention while I’m multitasking. It’s quite exciting, actually. I wouldn’t get to that part of my brain if I didn’t stop and let it happen.
• I usually work on the weekend. Often I am timing loads of laundry with chunks of time for project management or creating patterns. Again, being a multitasker, I enjoy the challenge of a long to-do list and seemingly not enough time to finish it. I’m just not convinced it’s the best way for me to do things every day of the week.
• I. Need. To. Draw. And I need my eyes for this. I need my hands. Being online requires both my eyes and my hands, so I don’t have a lot of focused creative time while I’m online. My creativity and drawing have soared since the advent of Offline Mondays.
• My brain is so addicted to multitasking that if it’s not doing fifty-seven things at once, it starts to invent things to take up all that extra thinking room. When I step away from the computer, all that extra thinking room is available for new ideas, new plans, thinking through past half-ideas, and making coherent thoughts into plans. It’s like running through a field of flowers I’ve never seen. I wake up Tuesday full of plans, hope, resolve, and usually a handful of sketches. That takes focused time, time that is hard to come by at my desk.
• Yesterday, I planted blueberries and grapes in my garden. On a weekday. When everyone else was working. But while I was planting, I was able to mull over a couple business ideas I’ve been ping-ponging around lately, and actually have a more cohesive plan. And I’ll have fresh fruit in a few weeks to boot!

Of course my crackberry is on the ottoman in front of me, and if someone needs something, I’m right there. But generally, Monday is the day the whole world is putting their head back on straight after a relaxing weekend, so I rarely have emergency calls.

Try it! Just once. Give yourself, your creativity, your brain some time to itself. I think you’ll be surprised at what the break will do for you.