THE WEEKEND EFFECT

Years ago, award-winning journalist Katrina Onstad was an au pair in France. Every Sunday, as best as she could tell, France shut down. No one worked, no one grocery shopped, or did any kind of shopping. You went on a hike, you visited grandmere, or friends came for dinner. It felt like a ritual, sacred and culturally protected.

Now as a mother herself, her weekends are more like a laundry list of to-do items dashed off between hockey practice, doing actual laundry, checking email, working on an assignment, and on and on. If she’s lucky, she’ll get a few hours of quiet time in front of the TV once the kids are asleep and that passes for her weekend leisure. Her kids see very little difference between the work week and weekends.

She began to do research to see if she was alone in feeling like weekends are almost non-existent anymore, and as she dug further and talked to more people, she realized that this feeling was almost universal, even in places like France where they cling to their customs dearly. But she also discovered that there is a ripple, poised to become a sea change of people and organizations (and in some cases lawmakers), determined to reinstate some of the boundaries between work and home in order to give people the weekend respite that they desperately need. And it’s not a benevolent impulse: it’s smart business. People work better and smarter when they have time away to recover. But they also make better parents, better spouses, and better people, and can do more good in the world, when they get real time away.

Filled with rich research and stories, as well as her own struggles, Katrina takes us through the negative impact that losing our downtime has on all areas of our lives. She’ll show us how some people and companies are already taking steps to eliminate the relentless 7 day a week availability that modern work life seems to require. Not anti-technology, rather this is about a return to the ritual of weekend.Katrina Onstad is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in numerous American and Canadian publications. She is also a novelist whose most recent novel was long-listed for the Giller Prize in Canada and received rave reviews.

Katrina Onstad is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in numerous American and Canadian publications. She is also a novelist whose most recent novel was long-listed for the Giller Prize in Canada and received rave reviews.