Mastering Mondays
A Sneak Peak Into Our First Self-Published Book
Mondays have a reputation for being the worst day of the week, especially among Millennials who dislike their jobs. Every single one of us knows the world of work isn’t what we were promised. For those of us fated to be labeled “millennials,” a fulfilling and satisfying career was supposed to be the reward for years and years of dedicated schoolwork. But each of us knows that the promise, well-intentioned as it was, was a lie.
According to reports by The Telegraph, Monday mornings are so depressing that on average, we don’t even smile until 11:16 AM.
Changing the perception of Mondays will not be easy. It has been deeply rooted in our workplace culture as the worst day of the week for decades. As Millennials, we were taught to hate Mondays ever since we were young. School ran from Monday to Friday, and Mondays have always represented the inevitable end to a relaxing weekend.
As seen here in the 1999 cult classic Office Space, no one escapes the bad case of the Mondays.
What many people don’t realize is that the idea of the five day work week is fairly new by historical standards. Days of rest were initially created to honor various religious traditions, and the idea of Saturday and Sunday being rest days was due to the influences of Jewish and Christian values in the United States.
It was in 1908 that the first factory in the United States gave its workers both Saturday and Sunday off. The idea slowly grew in popularity until 1926, when Henry Ford shut down his famous assembly lines completely on Saturday and Sunday, while still paying his employees the same wage. But with the adoption of a formal weekend came the problem of Mondays, the day everyone had to return to work.
Mondays don’t have to be horrible. It takes work. It takes planning. Perhaps most difficult of all, it takes a change in mindset. But by mastering Mondays, we take the all-important first steps towards mastering our workplaces and our lives.
Here are some practical things you can do to Master Mondays.
Before Mondays Begin
- Sleep and rest are vital — make sure you are waking up consistently, even on weekends. There’s a lot you can do to improve your sleep at night. Cool dark rooms, no electronics, no caffeine, etc. Do as much or as little as you need to make your sleep the best it can be.
- Review the workload on Friday to avoid surprises of your own making Monday morning.
- Don’t start new work projects over the weekend. New projects take up time and kill your weekend.
On Monday Morning
- Start with your most important tasks of the day first.
- Break your work into chunks. I recommend following the Pomodoro method of twenty minute work sections with five minute breaks, but experiment to find what length of time works best for you.
- Follow your most important and urgent tasks with tasks that are also important but not quite so urgent.
- Once all that is done, take an email break. Manage your email as you see fit, but create a system that works for you and reduces stress.
It’s no trivial task to make one day of every week the best it can be, but the completion of this process doesn’t just improve Mondays. It has the possibility to improve all seven days of the week. Mastering Mondays means mastering transition and gives you the tools to dominate your week.
Like other millennials, my friend Ryan Kirk and I both struggle with Mondays. We’re not perfect. Some Mondays are more challenging than others. However, we have found ways to fundamentally change the way we view Mondays, which consequently has improved our productivity and happiness.
We have shared these techniques in a self-published book called Mastering Mondays, available electronically on Amazon.
As you’ll see in our book, our approaches to Mondays are very different, but they’ve worked for each of us. We share how we have identified ways to make Mondays less evil, which we hope helps you discover your own path to overcoming the stereotypes associated with the first work day of the week.
