My Weekend Has No Off Button — And I Have Stopped Apologising For It

It is 6:47 AM on a Saturday. The house is quiet. And I am sitting at my desk, coffee in hand, staring at a spreadsheet of potential leads I did not finish reviewing on Friday.

Most people would call this a problem. I call it my most productive hours of the week.

I did not plan to be this kind of person. When I left the corporate world after years at CELCOM AXIATA and MIMOS, after all the structured meetings and reporting lines, I told myself I would finally have balance. Work smart, not just hard. Take weekends off.

That lasted about three weeks.

Because here is the truth nobody tells you when you become a founder: the company does not pause just because the calendar says Saturday. The market does not wait. Your competitors are not resting. And that idea sitting at the back of your mind all week? It will not sit quietly forever.

What I actually do on weekends

Let me be clear … it is not random busyness. I have learned the hard way that unfocused hustle on weekends leads to burnout without results. What I do now is deliberate. I call it my founder’s thinking time.

Saturdays, I think about customers. Who are they? Where are they? What problem keeps them up at night that FAVORIOT can solve? I go through LinkedIn. I study industry conversations. I look at who engaged with our content, who downloaded our case studies, who asked a question at the last webinar but never followed up. I build a picture of our next ten potential customers.

Sundays, I think about strategy. Not operations — operations belong to the week. Sundays are for the bigger picture. Where is IoT heading in the next twelve months? What should FAVORIOT be known for? Are we too broad? Are we too narrow? What is the one message I want the market to remember us for?

It sounds exhausting. But these are the hours where I feel most alive as a founder.

The question that changed everything

Here is something I have never said publicly before.

In FAVORIOT’s early years, I worried constantly about leads. Where was the next customer coming from? Were we going to survive the next quarter? I carried that anxiety into every weekend like a bag of rocks.

But somewhere along the way, the worry transformed into something else. Curiosity.

I stopped asking “where are the customers?” and started asking “why haven’t they found us yet?”

“Where are the customers?” is a passive question. It puts the burden somewhere else. “Why haven’t they found us yet?” is an active question. It puts the responsibility squarely on me.

When I sit with that second question on a Saturday morning with no distractions, the answers actually come.

Maybe our messaging is not clear enough. Maybe we are targeting the wrong industry vertical. Maybe we have a great product but we are invisible to the people who need it most. These are not questions you can answer in a thirty-minute meeting between calls on a Tuesday afternoon. They need space. They need silence. They need a Saturday.

Why writing is part of the strategy

I also use weekends to write. These articles, in fact, are almost always written during weekend hours. Because writing is not just content creation for me — it is thinking out loud.

Every time I write about IoT, about smart cities, about the journey of building FAVORIOT, I force myself to clarify what I actually believe and why. And that clarity feeds directly into how I lead the company, how I pitch to customers, and how I talk about what we do.

Content is strategy — if you do it right.

I have seen founders who say they do not have time to write, to share, to build a visible presence. And then they wonder why nobody knows about their company. The market does not discover you by accident. You have to show up – consistently, visibly, with something valuable to say.

Weekends give me the time to do that properly.

This is not about glorifying overwork

I want to be honest about something.

Rest is real. Rest is necessary. I still take walks. I still have lunch with family. I still sit and do nothing sometimes — and in those moments of nothing, the best ideas usually arrive uninvited.

But a full day of deliberately switching off from the business? My brain will not allow it. And at this stage of the journey — building FAVORIOT, growing our IoT platform, trying to become the partner of choice across Southeast Asia — I am not sure I would want it to.

When you are building something you genuinely believe in, thinking about it does not feel like work. It feels more like tending a garden you love.

One question worth sitting with

If you are a founder reading this, I am not asking you to copy my schedule. Every founder is different. Every business has its own rhythm.

But I will leave you with the question I ask myself every weekend morning:

“If I had just this one day — no emails, no meetings, no interruptions — what is the one thing I could work on that would change the trajectory of my company?”

That question alone is worth sitting with. Even at 6:47 AM on a Saturday.

What does your weekend look like as a founder? Are you resting, or are you building and do you think the two are really that different? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.