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Ahh, today is Friday. The day in which most Mon-Fri 9-5 workers enjoy the most. After Friday, the weekend rolls around offering ample opportunity to get things done or to just take a breather. However, for bloggers, freelancers, and online entrepreneurs, the weekends have become part of the work week.

Back on November 8th, I asked readers if they could relate to a statement that I saw come across my Twitter stream. The statement identified the fact that weekends used to mean no work but now, they have been relegated to days in which you stop working on the things you don’t want to do, and work on the things you want to do. I also asked our members of the Hive to share their thoughts on the matter and this is what you, and others had to say

Randa Clay – I usually work on client stuff during the week, and I enjoy it, but when the weekend comes I like to work on my own sites.

Daniel M – Yes that is something I can definitely relate with, especially when working online. I leave the weekdays for the boring stuff and the weekends for the things I actually do want to do.

Jeff Chandler A.K.A. Myself – I try to free up the weekends to provide time for myself to get my own personal projects worked on but thinking about what has to be accomplished the following work week sometimes prevents that from happening.

Vrijeme – I work all week plus weekends on jobs I want to do. No leisure time though.

Dave of clean red widgets – I can definitely relate to that – unless my football team happens to be playing 🙂

Here is what members of the Hive had to say:

Chris Garret – I think we need a reclaim the weekend campaign – I seem to get more and more demands on my time where some folks now think the business week is mon-fri then work double hard sat/sun!

Ryan Caldwell – Many people like me who work from home are willing to spend 3-5 hours in the middle of any random work day doing non-work related things. In fact, I’m in the habit these days of taking Thursdays off from 12-7pm while I visit my parents with my 6 month old son. So, given the luxuries of flexibility, I take it for granted that I need to make up some time on the weekends.

Char – I stopped doing any client work on weekends years ago. I reserve weekends (namely 1-2 hours Sat. am and Sun. am) for playing around with new projects of my own, tweaking my own sites and sometimes writing a few posts. If there is nothing going on on a rainy Sunday you may find me at my desk too – depends on my mood.

Raj Dash – I actually tend to do most of my real writing either in the evening or on weekends (Fri-Mon). The other days I sometimes plan work, research, do administrative stuff, or run personal errands. That doesn’t mean I don’t “work”, but it’s hard to shove creative tasks into a fixed time slot..

Matt Craven – I think in the “new” economy – i.e. the jobs that we all have – we tend to work when we feel most productive.. and because most of us are, in essence, working for ourselves, we fit this into whatever rhythm seems to make sense.

Lucy Nixon – But I think sometimes you just do have to work the weekend, and he and I both come from the big consultancies which expect you to do that, so for us, that is the norm. Not a good thing, though, particularly with a young family. So I’m trying to set boundaries – starting with not replying to client emails over the weekend and working up!

Ahmed – I work on weekends so i can take the week off

The bottom line is, for most people who work in the online world, Weekends don’t seem to have the same meaning as they once did. Thanks in due part to the flexibility offered through working from home, working on the weekends is not as bad when you can spend time with your family and get things around the house completed during the work week.

While the U.S. goes face to face with an economic spiral, Six Apart is doing its part by laying off 8 percent of its staff. Six Apart who develops Movable Type as their open source platform and TypePad as their commercial platform published an internal memo on their public blog to inform everyone as to why the cuts were made.

So why are we doing this? First, as with many companies these days we are being proactive about keeping our expenses low. Second, with so many changes in 2008, and looking forward to the changing market 2009, we have to rebalance our organization accordingly.

Interesting to note that recessions usually make for great times within the blogosphere for hobbyists or for those who want to communicate in a more cost friendly way. So far though, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In their announcement, Six Apart lays out some structural changes such as:

The Creation Of A Genius Group: Think of this as Six Apart increasing their
sales/ad team.

Growing Six Apart Services: Six Apart will be moving available staff around to the services department in order to better serve companies who rely on them to run their site.

Technology Team: Various teams from across the company will be condensed under the leadership of one man.

Six Apart Media: Despite the rough economy, Six Apart believes their advertising agency will grow throughout 2009. In response to this, they will be increasing the number of people on their sales force.

The most interesting part about this entire announcement is that Chris Alden will be taking a 15% pay cut as part of the companies cost cutting measures. Kudos on him for being a man and actually trying to keep his company afloat instead of jumping off a building and floating away with a golden parachute.

Read more about the announcement here.