With a Bare Minimum Monday, you are guaranteed to start your workweek relaxed.
Do you know that feeling? Sunday is almost over and you start to realize that another work week is coming up. Instead of being able to fully relax, you feel stressed and anxious about Monday and you can't escape it: you have the Sunday Scaries. Fortunately, there is a new trend in the workplace to combat these Sunday Scaries: ‘Bare Minimum Monday’. This means that on Monday you only perform the most essential tasks to protect your mental health and prevent a potential burnout.
Bare Minimum Monday originated on TikTok and quickly became popular among Gen Z employees. By only performing your most important tasks on Monday and not immediately starting at full speed, you can conserve your energy and prevent yourself from becoming exhausted by the end of the week. The idea of Bare Minimum Monday is to give employees the space to balance their own well-being and workload. It does not mean that you do nothing or are unproductive. Building in rest is actually very productive and necessary for our overall health. It also gives you the opportunity to decide how to best use your time, so you can ultimately perform your work better.
According to experts, a Bare Minimum Monday is a must when it comes to addressing early signs of burnout. These can include feelings of exhaustion or fatigue, behaving cynically towards your work, feeling a great distance from your work, and you may experience reduced professional effectiveness, in other words: you get very little work done. It is therefore important to create a work situation that allows you to start your week calmly, where you have control over your own time and tasks. This balances your well-being and creates space to do some deeper work at the beginning of the week, before you are overwhelmed by various loose tasks that prevent you from performing at your best.
Planning a Bare Minimum Monday is very simple. All you need to do is take some time to determine which tasks are most essential to prepare for the week. Prioritize the most urgent and time-sensitive tasks first and use the rest of the day to orient yourself for the week ahead. What exactly the most important tasks are will, of course, vary for everyone. For some, the best way to start the week may be to handle administrative tasks or schedule meetings, while for others it may be a good idea to focus on tasks that need to be completed that week and especially not schedule any meetings. Whatever your situation is: review your workload and determine how to best spend your first workday of the week. How you choose to structure your Monday is up to you, but the goal is always the same: to structure a day in a way that keeps the Sunday Scaries at a very great distance.
Source: Well + Good
