Working Friday to Monday doesn’t have to mean working on the weekend. Instead, it can point to our mental approach to the week.
In a typical work environment, people saunter in Monday morning after an exhausting weekend releasing the stress and anxiety from last week. People are so excited by the week’s progression that Wednesday is known as hump-day (you get over the hump). Thursday becomes Friday-junior. And Friday, of course, is the gilded office-water-cooler meme — TGIF.
It’s 5 days of emails, phone calls, meetings, interruptions, reports, etc, and 2 days to let it all go (temporarily). The problem with this progression is that attrition is built-in to every moment of waking life. You can’t win when you keep giving 5 and taking back 2. For most people, it’s not feasible to work less, so a change in approach is required.
If you are passionate about and engaged in your work, then changing your approach — or not needing to in the first place — is easy. There are numerous ways to do this, and it is fact specific to you. Maybe it means asking for more responsibility, taking more risks, taking fewer risks, addressing a long-standing issue, moving something forward/backward/sideways, getting to inbox 0/100/10k, ignoring your inbox entirely, etc.
I saw a meme on reddit recently that read: Do sharks complain about Monday? No. They’re up early, bitting Stuff, chasing s*&t, being scary – reminding everyone they’re a f!%*king shark.