Preflight Conversations : How To Beat The Monday Blues

Monday might not be the busiest day of the week, yet the very idea that it’s a Monday evokes a sense of dread. Here's how to beat the blues

May 4, 2022

Author

Usha Kalva

Authors

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illustrator

Sivaprakash

Do your Mondays have an impact on how your week goes?

It may be a cognitive bias at play here! The Peak End Rule is a cognitive bias on how people remember past events.

Intense positive or negative moments (the “peaks”) and the final moments of an experience (the “end”) are heavily weighted in our mental calculus.

The rule is a derivate of many of Daniel Kahneman’s and Barbara Frederickson’s research findings that the human memory is rarely a perfectly accurate record of events.

We asked our community about how they deal with this bias at the start of a workweek. Here are the responses that we got. By the end of this, we hope your confidence to deal with Monday blues is soaring!

There ain’t no blues here, just painting the week red!

Keep your Mondays and Fridays free from recurring meetings to strategize the week and reflect on the past week. This will make your Tuesdays and Thursdays more productive! Wednesdays are for recurring meetings.

-Piyush Wason, Head of Technical Consultancy - Condeco

TikTok to the rescue?

Spend 5 minutes watching something funny on TikTok, like a standup comedian. This will put you in a good mood and get you going.

-Oliver Plane, Customer Success Executive - NorthStar.buzz

High on activity, high on productivity.

Exercise first thing in the morning!

-Jeff Kushmerek, CEO and Founder - Infinite Renewals

A checklist and a safety net

Write down “5 good enough things” every day. Be forgiving to yourself, because Mondays aren’t. If all else fails, watch animal videos that will make you laugh so hard that you snort!

-Katie Clark, Manager, Onboarding - PartnerStack

What is your happy place?

Plan fun activities with your kids. Snooze work notifications while you’re at it! If number crunching is your happy place, do the digging on Monday, and catch up with your teams and internal stakeholders.

-Saurabh Guru, Head of Customer Solutions - Whatfix