A weekend writing prompt

Check-ins. Desk plants with twee names. The iPad bolted to the conference room door, or your boss’s face staring down at you from a giant TV screen. It’s Labor Day weekend, a time to detach from the construct we know as work — the 9 to 5, the grind, the unnecessary meeting at 4 p.m. on a dead-silent Friday.

But not all of life’s labor happens on the clock. We stress ourselves out on nights, weekends, and holidays with mountains of tasks we dutifully tackle for free: emotional labor, second-draft texts, plodding dinners with friend-quaintances, family vacations that require more planning than launching a small business, passion projects that go sour in the light of day.

This Labor Day weekend, part ways with your uncompensated stressors. Tell the story of a favor, a relationship, a self-assigned deadline, a work-outside-of-work something you couldn’t let go of, and let it go. Stop working, maybe, for once.

Publish your story on Medium with the tag “Human Prompt,” and we’ll feature our favorite responses in Human Parts.

Weekend Writing Prompt: Labor of Life was originally published in Human Parts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.