The Saturday Problem

Last Saturday morning, I was sitting at my kitchen table…

…working.

Not because I planned to.
Not because I wanted to.
Not because Saturday was "the right time."

I was working on Saturday because it didn't get done during the week. Again.

The week before that? Same thing.

A keynote deck I was supposed to build on Tuesday was now staring back at me from my laptop at 7 AM on a Saturday while the rest of my family slept in.

And the week before that?

I was reviewing findings for a portfolio company...work that should have been done on Wednesday...instead of helping my wife make breakfast.

And here’s what's embarrassing…

I TEACH founders how to STOP doing stuff like this

I literally have a framework called the "Minimum Viable Week" that's designed to protect your most important work.

And yet here I am...doing the very thing I tell other people to stop doing.

I had a choice to make: I could wallow in my own hypocrisy and pretend I had everything under control, or I could build a system to fix it.

I chose to fix it, and the system I built is what I'm sharing today. I call it…

Here's the thing about Saturday work...

…it's never the unimportant stuff.

The work that bleeds into your weekend is usually the most important work in your business. The strategic work. The creative work. The thinking work.

But it's also work that isn't super-urgent. (If it were urgent, I would have done it during the week instead of bumping it yet again.)

And because nobody's yelling at you to get it done, it gets pushed to Saturday morning, where it finally gets done in a quiet house with a cup of coffee and zero interruptions.

(Which, ironically, is exactly the environment it should have had on Tuesday.)

Here's how to fix it.

Grab a piece of paper and list everything you actually did the last four Saturdays and Sundays.

Not what you planned to do… what you did.

For example, when I went through this exercise, I wrote:

Now, ask yourself one question for each task:

When should this have happened during the work week?

Most of our tasks have a natural home. For example, for me…

...they just didn't land there because something else ate that time.

And that brings us to Step 2...

For each Saturday task, trace it back to the weekday block it should have lived on.

Then ask: What was on that block instead?

When I did this exercise, the pattern was obvious...

My Tuesday creative blocks (the ones I'm supposed to protect for this kind of work) kept getting hijacked by reactive stuff.

In my experience, the thief is usually one of three things: (1) a "quick question" that turned into an hour, (2) reactive work that felt urgent but wasn't, or (3) busy work I did to distract me from the important (but difficult) work I knew I needed to do but just didn’t want to.

(In other words…procrastination.)

Name the thief. Write it down.

Because you can't defend against an unknown enemy.

Here's what I know for sure after running companies for 20+ years...

If it's not on my calendar, it doesn't get done.

I wrote about this in my year-end review, and it's a lesson I keep having to re-learn:

My time got consumed by someone else's emergency, and I didn't even remember what it was (even though it was supposedly "important" and "urgent.")

The fix isn't to "be more disciplined..."

...the fix is to schedule meetings with yourself, and then honor those meetings.

Take the 2-3 tasks that keep sliding to Saturday and give each one a named, recurring meeting block on the weekday where it belongs.

Not "sometime Tuesday"… a specific block with a specific start time and end time.

BONUS TIP: Set your calendar to auto-decline any conflicting meetings. (This is the step that actually makes it work.)

Now here's the rule that gives the whole system teeth:

If any task slides to Saturday two weeks in a row, it either gets a defended calendar block on the weekday where it belongs...or it gets killed.

No third option.

If it's important enough to do on a Saturday, it's important enough to protect on a weekday.

If it's not important enough to protect on a weekday, stop pretending it's important.

The tracking metric is simple: Saturdays worked per month.

The goal is zero. Not "fewer"...zero.

Again, the Saturday Problem isn't a discipline problem...it's a calendar problem.

The fix is simple: audit what's landing on Saturday, find what's stealing its weekday block, defend that block, and enforce the Saturday Rescue Rule. If it's not on the calendar, it doesn't get done.

⚡ Action Step: Open your calendar right now and list what you did the last two Saturdays. For each task, find the weekday block it should have lived on...and what stole that block. Then create one defended calendar block this week for the task that slides most often.

Give it a shot and let me know how it works…

-Ryan

Ryan Deiss Co-Founder and CEO, The Scalable Company

P.S. And in case you're wondering, yes...I'm writing this on a Tuesday and queueing it up to send on Sunday. You're welcome. 😄

P.P.S. I'm looking for 5 business owners who want to work 1-on-1 with my team and me to install a custom "operating system" so your business can scale and so you can exit the day-to-day. Click here for the details.