Monday isn't the only day

How to make work more sustainable

I know a lot of Vanderhacks readers love to plan. Hopefully you’re even got a plan to do your weekly planning on my favorite planning day — Friday — so you can hit Monday morning ready to go.

That’s great, but there’s one issue to watch out for with weekly planning. It can be tempting to over plan for Monday, aiming to get as many priorities done as possible.

But having too many to-dos for Monday can make Monday feel like a slog. The beginning of the week is rough enough. It’s also unnecessary because, in most cases, you will plan to work the rest of the week too.

So it’s wise to recognize that Monday isn’t the only day of the week. The upside of planning by weeks is that you can look at the whole of the week. Maybe one big task can happen on Monday, and another on Wednesday since you can see that your Wednesday meeting schedule is much lighter than Tuesday. You might see that Thursday afternoon is completely open, so you decide to block it and put something that will require a lot of focus then.

The unknowable future

Now, I do understand why people who’ve gotten their heads around the idea of weekly planning might overstuff Monday. You don’t know what new things will come up by the end of the week. There might be bad stuff. There might be good stuff. Most likely it will be a mix of both. We might like to “clear the decks” so we’re ready for anything.

I do generally advocate leaving some time open later in the week (“plan tight, then plan light”) to deal with the unexpected. But you can leave Thursday and Friday more open and still distribute your weekly priorities over Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday instead of stuffing everything on Monday.

I think the deeper reason for assigning everything to Monday is that people don’t really trust their to-do lists. They worry if they assign themselves something for Wednesday, they won’t actually get to it. If it needs to happen, better to at least try on Monday.

A contract with yourself

But if you treat your daily to-do lists as contracts with yourself, then this becomes less of a fear. You are assigning a task to Wednesday knowing that you will only assign work to Wednesday that you actually intend to do on Wednesday. The list won’t be long (because stuff comes up) and the list will be well chosen (because it’s stuff that needs to happen then). But barring absolute disaster, you will do everything assigned to Wednesday by the end of the day. Developing that discipline means you can actually plan things for the future, trusting that your future self will do them. You feel less pressure to do everything that matters on any given day.

I think that’s a better way to approach planning. Mondays should feel challenging, but they should also feel doable. By planning the whole week, and allocating priorities more equally on different days, you can actually finish stuff. Progress is motivational. That makes us want to keep going. You can win the week by recognizing that Monday isn’t the only day. It’s an important day, but not the only one available. Think full, but not crammed. You’ll feel less busy, and you’ll also get more done.