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A Love Letter To The No-Plan Weekend – Why They Remain Unbeatable

When your job is full-on and your eyeballs are ready to drop out of their sockets, weekends doing nothing are simply the best.

Group Chat is a weekly series where HuffPost UK writers discuss friendship, diary dilemmas and how to reclaim our social lives in a busy world.

As you age, life flies by fast. One weekend you’re dusting off your summer clothes, excited about the prospect of a bike ride and a picnic in the sun; the next you’re getting Christmas decorations out, wondering where the year went.

Weekend after weekend I find myself fully-booked thanks to pre-made plans, often ones I’ve made months in advance, with absolutely no wiggle room for spontaneity – which, let’s face it, is the best kind of fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing and spending time with friends and family. There’s something very satisfying about the build-up to a trip to the Cotwolds, brunch and shopping with a mate, or a weekend away with the other half.

But the truth is when your job is full-on, you’ve had A Week™ and your eyeballs are getting ready to drop out of their sockets, no-plan weekends are simply the best.

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There’s no need to panic, a no-plan weekend doesn’t mean sitting alone on your own in the dark. You can attend that BBQ your mate organised last-minute. You can laze about in the garden or park without a care about what time you’ve got to leave.

You can go to the gym for an impromptu workout or head to a lido. You might discover a local market or an event happening which you would’ve otherwise missed.

You might even choose not to leave the sofa and binge-watch an entire Netflix series instead, which is a perfectly valid way to spend 48 hours.

The spontaneity of it all – especially in the context of a life which often seems planned to a tee – is exhilarating.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who is relentlessly held hostage by their diary. I don’t want to be a person who burns out and cancels on friends or family last-minute, or gets to Sunday evening, week after week, feeling knackered. And all because I didn’t give myself time to recharge.

In a world where we’re constantly on-the-go and stress levels are rocketing, I think it would be smart for people to leave one weekend a month (or two months, at the very least) where they don’t book anything in.

No-plan weekends leave you with zero excuses not to look after yourself, to do the things you want (and, in some cases, need) to do such as having a bath, going to get your hair done or going for a run. Sometimes you just need them for the sake of your sanity.

So every now and then I’ll choose to not make plans: I won’t book in brunches or trains to other places and instead will mark the occasion with a Friday night takeaway, heralding the start of some much-needed me-time.

As for a no-plan bank holiday weekend, which I’m about to throw myself headfirst into... well world, watch this space.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.