The “9-to-5 job” has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur. Now, the demands of a career often require work­ing more than just 8 hours a day. And if you are a par­ent, it gets even tougher to jug­gle all the neces­si­ties dur­ing the work week — jobs, day­care, school­ing, shop­ping, doc­tors vis­its, after school sports, music lessons, etc. More and more peo­ple are find­ing that their entire week is con­sumed and there is almost no time left for things like social­iz­ing with fam­ily and friends or catch­ing up on the chores that accu­mu­late like home and car main­te­nance. We are all so busy, there’s even less and less time left for sleep.

As a result, all the stuff that doesn’t get done dur­ing the week gets shifted to the week­end. Here are some things you can do to make your­self a more suc­cess­ful week­end warrior:

First, keep track of all the things you need to get done as you become aware of them. Your car’s Main­te­nance light doesn’t often come on while you’re dri­ving by your mechanic and right when you have enough free time to pull in and have them do the work, for exam­ple. Hav­ing a handy list of the things you need to get done will allow you to spend less time try­ing to remem­ber them and more time actu­ally get­ting stuff done.

Sec­ond, develop a plan. So that you don’t end up bounc­ing back and forth between things you need to do or, even worse, work­ing on things that are less impor­tant than oth­ers, pri­or­i­tize all the things you need to get done start­ing with the things that are crit­i­cal and must get done this week­end. If it’s April 14th and you have to choose between fin­ish­ing your taxes and weed­ing the lawn, fin­ish­ing your taxes should come first, for example.

Third, don’t beat your­self up if you don’t get done as much as you had hoped. Your list should be lengthy in case you get more accom­plished than you expected, or in case you end up not being able to work on some­thing for an unex­pected rea­son, but you should set a real­is­tic expec­ta­tion as to how much you can do in the time that you have to do it.

Above all, keep your cool. You may lose a bat­tle here or there, but if you get orga­nized and stay focused, you will win the war.