How 'Bare Minimum Mondays' Became the Latest Big Work Trend to Know

By Bill Murphy Jr., Inc. (TNS)

If you’re running a business, sometimes it’s a helpful exercise to think back to what things were like before you were the boss.

Maybe you were fortune and had jobs you liked and leaders you respected.

But if not—or maybe even if so—you might have had days when you just didn’t want to go in, and even weekends when you dreaded what Monday morning would bring.

It doesn’t mean you were a lazy worker or a bad person. It means you were human. (I assume you still are.)

And even if the highs and lows of a typical day or week have changed for you now, the experience of having worked for other people can be instructive.

With that, let’s talk about a TikToker named Marisa Jo, whose post about dreading Monday morning at work—and what she did about it—has apparently resonated with a lot of people, as it’s gained nearly 2 million views.

She starts out by describing how her weekends were capped by “Sunday Scaries” as her anxiety grew:

Get out of bed feeling like you were already behind. You’d make a to-do list that was way too long, thinking you could overachieve your way out of the stress. But you never did. Five p.m. meant relief that you were off the clock, shame that your list wasn’t done, and dread for the next day.

Ouch. I wouldn’t want to work that way either. Her solution? A schedule that she calls “bare minimum Mondays.”

One Monday last year you woke up and gave yourself permission to do the absolute bare minimum for work that day. And everything felt different.

There you have it: We rolled past the Great Resignation, disquieted ourselves with quiet quitting, reaped the benefits of rage applying, and now we’re going to be talking about bare minimum Mondays.

And there are strong feelings on both sides:

Burned out employees saying, “Yes! I’m with you! I’m also going to just ‘mail it in’ on Mondays.”
Disturbed bosses, along with perpetually perturbed commentators, saying, “That’s it, more proof that our youngest workers simply don’t want to work.”

As so often happens, a few key points have been missed. So let’s lay them out:

First, nobody works hard all the time. Even the most dedicated employees and motivated entrepreneurs have an ebb and flow to their effort. So being honest with oneself and identifying the day on which it’s hardest to be productive seems like an exercise in self-awareness.
Second, while I’m not sure what Marisa Jo was doing for work when she supposedly started with her reduced-stress Mondays, she’s now apparently self-employed or a startup co-founder. So, while she clearly created the video in the hope it would be seen, she really only answers to herself now.
Finally, the truth is that a lot of people really are burned out right now. And as a boss, sometimes the best thing you can do is to try to be empathetic, listen hard, and be responsive. Although maybe I’d pick a less in-your-face way to describe it than “bare minimum.”

Regardless, if someone’s slow day is Monday but they get their work done the rest of the week, what’s the harm? Imagine how much better your old days working for someone else might have been if they’d had the same attitude.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Murphy Jr. is the founder of Understandably.com and a contributing editor at Inc.com.

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