Give Me A Break

Katrina Onstad’s The Weekend Effect is a manifesto for the overworked masses

- Bret Begun

At the beginning of Katrina Onstad’s The Weekend Effect: The Life-Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork, the author’s 12-year-old son asks on a Sunday night, “Was that the weekend?” “Yes, it was,” she replies. “But,” he says, “it didn’t feel like a weekend.” Onstad, gripped with the anxiety any mom would have if her child were unaware that he’d just lived through two days off, does an audit of her family’s last 48 hours. What she finds is a mix of work email, homework help, laundry, hockey practice, dog wrangling, grocery shopping, and more. The postmortem concludes: “To keep Sunday distinguishable from Saturday, I might top off the above with some light toilet cleaning.”