EVERY Friday, 36-year-old Leanne French hopes that this will be the weekend she and her husband take their 16-month-old son to visit friends in the Berkshires or on a trip to the beach.

“In your ideal world, you plan these weekends – but then you’re like, we didn’t have time to clean the apartment, or go to Ikea. Or work comes up. So you postpone your Saturday plans for Sunday, and then Sunday comes, and you just think, ‘We’ll do it next weekend.’ “

In the summer, it’s even worse. “You feel this vacuum pull of people hitting the highways on Fridays,” she says. “I live on the Upper West Side, and I see people packing up their SUVs to get out of town. You feel like everyone but you is making the most of their weekends in the summertime.

How did it get like this?” asks French, adding that she sometimes wonders whether she and her husband are alone in feeling overburdened on weekends.

In fact, they’re far from alone: A new study by the Families and Work Institute says 33 percent of people are in contact with work once a week or more outside normal work hours and 37 percent take vacation’s shorter than seven days.

Now more than ever, weekends spent in the pursuit of leisure are a rare luxury. There’s even a movement afoot – among groups like Take Back Your Time and Leisure Time Productions – to reclaim weekends and free time.

Kristine Enea, co-author of the new book, “Time Off! The Upside to Downtime,” quit her “very high-pressure job” at a software company in 2001 to devote herself to advocacy of leisure – “a basic human need that regularly goes unfulfilled,” she says.

Enea points to studies that show the more wellrested and less stressed employees are, the more creative, energetic and productive they will be.

“Studies show that people who don’t take vacations have a shortened life span,” she says. “And people who work six hours a day are as productive as people who work eight. I just don’t think we’ve come up with the mindset yet where you’re like, ‘At 5 p.m. on Friday, I’m done – no calls or e-mails about work.’ ”

But for French and her husband, there’s no such thing as quitting time.

He’s a freelance photographer, and if work comes up on the weekends, he takes it. He also teaches part-time at NYU and the International Center for Photography – and those gigs are always on weekends.

French is a stay-at-home mom who tries to work at least two days a week. Her only free time is after 9 p.m., when her son falls asleep.

“A baby adds a whole new level to managing your time,” she says. “We really make an effort for our weekends to be our downtime. Or even if we have nothing that has to be done, in New York you always feel like you should be doing something – you should go see this museum show. You should catch up on a little bit of work.”

New York City therapist Dr. Peter Fraenkel says that he has seen a 50 percent spike in the number of couples seeking help because their jobs follow them home to dinner, to bed and the weekends.

“I’ve seen couples nearly break up over this,” he says, adding that he rarely has a session in which one partner’s cellphone or pager doesn’t go off.

Fraenkel recently treated a high-powered New York couple whose marriage was suffering because the husband would check his work email first thing on Saturday mornings at the couple’s country home.

“It is increasingly hard for people to know when they’re at work and when they’re not,” says Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at NYU.

“With cellphones, e-mail and text messaging, there is pressure to be performing at all times – and New York City is the quintessential example of this trend.”

It wasn’t always like this. In 1977, the average dualearner couple spent a combined 81 hours at work; by 2002, that number climbed to 91 hours a week.

“I feel like people are hitting the wall,” says Enea. “The leisure movement is about taking back your time, and your life outside of work.”

Enea says she knows of one CEO who insisted that his executives take off two weeks at a time: “He thought it was good for creativity,” she says.

But those struggling just to get by in New York City – like 24-year-old Jay Belin, who works three jobs to pay the bills – say that kind of time off is impossible.

“I spend 90 percent of my waking life working, and I think it’s a very New York-centric problem,” says Belin, who says he is working toward a tangible, if counterintuitive, goal: “not working in the corporate machine.”

Belin has a 9-to-5 administrative gig from Mondays to Fridays, then works the guest list at either the Bowery Ballroom or Webster Hall – including Fridays and Saturdays.

He’s also managing editor of the music site looserecord.com – and he spends his weekends holding staff meetings, going to work-related social events and cleaning his Lower East Side apartment.

Belin’s actual weekend recreation has been reduced to a couple of hours spent at Tompkins Square Park. “I stare at the dogs and try to drift off,” he says. “But my mind’s usually racing. I take a notepad with me so that as soon as ‘leisure time’ is up, I’m ready to roll again.”

Some New Yorkers think overwork is good for creativity – like 33-yearold Ravi Gulivindala, who works days as a portfolio manager and nights at his new downtown restaurant, Ludo.

Gulivindala is a divorced father of two boys, ages 3 and 6. He spends Saturdays and Sundays with them. He averages 36 hours of sleep a week. His phone is always on for work.

He doesn’t take vacations, just a couple of days in Vegas, but even then he’s working, taking calls at 6 a.m. when the markets open on the East Coast. He doesn’t go to movies.

“I’m dying to see the new ‘Star Wars,’ ” he says. “It’s not gonna happen. If I can, I try and do the on-demand thing.” He has no time for dating.

But Gulivindala says he prefers life this way, and says it’s partly due to his upbringing: He’s firstgeneration American. His parents emigrated from India and his father worked two jobs, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

“You don’t come to this country and think you’re going to coast,” he says.

Sociologist Gerson understands his point of view – to a point.

“Americans love to work, and the culture of work is something to celebrate,” she says. “But in the long run, we have to figure out some ways to put some constraints on this.”

Even a hustling workaholic like Belin acknowledges that she may have a point: “When I leave the office on Fridays now, and the sun is still shining, it’s a terrible thing to be thinking about all the work you have to go home and do,” he says, “as opposed to calling your friends and saying, ‘Hey, let’s meet for 7 o’clock margaritas.’ “