The weekend isn’t a catch-up session for everyone else’s needs. Save some of it for yours.

Unclaimed time gets claimed, not through anything hostile but because an empty space in a calendar reads as available. Unless some of it is spoken for in advance, every free hour finds a use somebody else proposed, and you arrive at Monday having rested very little. Time you have not allocated is time you have handed over.

Block a few hours of the weekend before anyone asks, and treat the block as a real commitment. It does not have to be productive. When people ask, say you already have something, because you do.