I'm a hardworking guy, but I'm also a horrible procrastinator. My brain is hardwired to work under deadlines and pressure, and when I find myself with a lot of free time—like on weekends—I can let a lot slip away without realizing it.

If I have an especially grueling week at the office (luckily, I've learned how to make my procrastination habit work in my professional life), I'm prone to coming home Friday night, plopping down on the couch and vegging out for a day or two straight. By Monday morning, I'm sitting at my desk going "What the hell did I actually do this weekend?" As nice as it is to have times when I just don't do anything—and I think that's important—it's no fun to feel like entire days or weekends are wasted.

My remedy for trying to avoid that is to ask myself a simple question: Was what you just did worth the time you spent on it?

It sounds too easy, but it's actually really effective. It's the difference between deciding in advance that I'm going to dink around online for an hour or realizing, "Whoops, I just spent my entire evening dinking around online."

I'm not some kind of shark, where I always have to be moving. But I do want my free time to feel like it's good, refreshing and well used. I want to be able to say at our Monday morning coffee, "I did this, that and that this weekend. Boom."

This is by no means perfected, but I'm working on it. If you're like me and want to learn even more, check out this post from Business Insider: How Successful People Make The Most Of Their Weekends.

Note:  This post originally appeared on Paul's personal blog.