Hump Day

Wednesday is commonly known as Hump Day. It’s the day of the week that represents the middle of the workweek, meaning that once you get over the hump of Wednesday that you’re on the backside of the week and closer to the weekend.

Wednesday, therefore, has a theme for most people. This is especially so if your work week runs from Monday to Friday.

I give every single day of the week a theme. These themes are personal, meaning that they don’t mean much to anyone else but they mean a whole lot to me.

For the longest time, Wednesday was my Looking Day — that I focussed on “looking at things.” It was also the day that I focussed on making things for people to look at, such as video, Instagram posts (I would craft 5 to 7 posts every Wednesday), and even write a few of these daily blog posts to create some sort of backlog.

But the thing is, Wednesday is “hump day” whether you look at it from the vantage point of the workweek or week as a whole.

I start my week on a Sunday — a lot of calendars that you look at still list Sunday as the start of the week as well. So with that in mind, Wednesday still acts as the “hump day” of my week. And the thing about Wednesday for myself and anyone who looks at it through the lens of it being the middle of the workweek is that once you’re on the other side of it, you’re already thinking about the weekend. (Like it or not, it’s happening in an obvious way or in a subliminal way.)

That’s why I’ve moved my Deep Work Day from Thursday to Wednesday.

I found I wasn’t getting as much deep work done on Thursdays as I’d hoped. The reason I know this is that I journal every single day and one of the things I evaluate in those journal entries is how well I followed the theme of the day.

One of the things that I noticed that showed up repeatedly every Thursday was my lack of progress on deep work. I couldn’t figure out why. It’s not like I schedule any meetings on Thursdays — my Deep Work Day is devoid of meetings. I’d already moved Deep Work Day once before — from Friday to Thursday because I knew that Fridays would occasionally be a holiday of some sort (either school-related or otherwise). I knew that when my Deep Work Day fell on a holiday that little to no deep work would get done, so I shifted it to Thursdays.

So why was deep work now such a problem for me on Thursday?

After spending some time, energy, and attention deliberating this question that the answer was one of the things I spent deliberating the question itself: Energy.

I realized that once I passed Wednesday during the course of my week that I didn’t have as much energy. That’s why Thursday wasn’t working for deep work — I just didn’t have enough energy to get that kind of work done.

So I reconfigured my Daily Themes and wound up with Wednesday being the day that I give my overarching focus to deep work.

Now this isn’t to say that Wednesday is going to be the permanent home of deep work. I don’t have enough anecdotal data from my journal telling me that it is working yet. But I do know that Thursday wasn’t working, so I had to make a change.

That leads me to a question I’d like you to consider: What if you changed you perspective about Hump Day?

What if you decided that Hump Day wasn’t a hump that you had to get over before heading into the weekend but it was a day that you set aside to do deep work? The kind of work that would allow you to move closer to the weekend knowing with a greater sense of accomplishment? What if you thought of Wednesday as the summit of your week instead of a hump that you had to get over? When you’re at the summit of the mountain you can see a whole lot more of the landscape. Plus the views are rather impressive. What if you made your Wednesdays as impressive as that? What if you made the things that you did on Wednesdays as impressive as that?

That’s how I’m looking at Wednesdays from now on. I think it’s going to make it’s a much better day and lead to a much better week… And weekend.