Who doesn’t hate Monday mornings? They’re where weekend bliss goes to die and a veritable black hole for positive vibes. But fret not—like the common cold, the Monday blues are prevalent but both curable and preventable. The beginning of the work week might not be everybody’s cup of tea but luckily, you can remedy those bad vibes throughout the week with more than just a cup of coffee (which, incidentally, is best taken at mid-morning rather than first thing). But chasing away the mania of Mondays doesn’t start when you roll out of bed on the first day of the work week. It starts the week before! Keep reading for our guide to manageable Mondays.
Thank God It’s Friday!
To ensure that the first day of the work week isn’t the craziest, you have to prep for battle as early as Friday. Prepare your work station before you leave the office on Friday so you don’t find a mountain of mess on your desk come Monday morning. Organized workstations breed productivity, and efficiently save you time, space, and energy.
Pause and Play: Ready for the Weekend
As much as possible, leave work at work and take time off to do things you enjoy. Be a Saturday Slumber Princess or Adventurous Weekend Warrior—either way, you deserve to let loose and kick off those work shoes. Worrying about tasks to do and deadlines to meet on your non-work days will make it seem like you never left the office. Shut the door on the office work in your head, or you’ll feel all the more tired once the work week starts anew.
Use Sunday Afternoons and Evenings as Prep Time
Love putting together sensible yet chic outfits to wear to the office? One fun activity you can do on Sundays is plan your outfits for the week. Sunday is still part of the weekend, but you can prep yourself for the week ahead by reflecting on the lighter sides of your working life, like your baon menu, work outfits, and even the stories you plan to share with your office mates. Check your to-do list (or prepare one if you don’t have it yet) so you go into the work week knowing exactly what you need to do first. Don’t forget to schedule break times for stress relief! Even taking just 15 minutes to relax will do you a world of good.
Waking Up to the Start of Your Work Week
And we’re back again, live, on Monday morning. It’s not the easiest thing in the world, but meditate on what makes you happy and radiate good vibes out into the universe as soon as you wake up. This doesn’t mean you have to transform into a cheerful, chirpy person all of a sudden (although, good on you if you can face Monday mornings all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed), but a sunny disposition can pretty much shape the course of your day as well as the week ahead.
Just Another Manic Monday
Before you charge into the line of fire that is Monday morning at the office, practice a few productivity hacks. Review your to-do list and prioritize your tasks according to urgency, level of difficulty, and duration. Don’t dive into work right away, either—chat up a colleague or two! Finally, make yourself comfortable, adjust your seat, lay down your things, and stretch a bit before rolling up your sleeves and getting to work.
Always give your 100% at work. When you plan your tasks out for the week, try to spread them so they look like this: 13% Monday, 22% Tuesday, 26% Wednesday, 35% Thursday, 4% Friday. If you’ll notice, those numbers don’t spike at the start, so pan out your tasks evenly throughout the other days.
And if you can learn to start your work week right even before it begins, maybe you’ll start developing an immunity to those Monday blues.
Featured image by normalityrelief via Flickr Creative Commons (CC by SA 2.0)