Anxiety on Sunday nights can be squashed

Every Sunday night, I used to get anxiety like clockwork. I would leave work on Friday feeling accomplished after a week of hard work. But on Sunday night, I would feel behind. Even if I didn’t receive any emails all weekend or any new tasks, I still got anxiety. It was a horrible feeling and it continued for years.

To get rid of my Sunday night anxiety, I did what many people do: Work Sunday nights. That worked for a while until I started missing too many social functions with my friends and families because of work on a day that is supposed to be about

rest and having fun.

I became a workaholic, and I needed to do something about it. I started looking into the cause, and after hours of thinking and research, I finally nailed it.

It was all Monday’s fault. I knew Monday was a bad day, but I had no idea it was the cause of my stress.

I had the most anxiety on the weekend when I had things due on Monday because all I could think about was the work I needed to do to be ready for my Monday meetings and deadlines.

I figured it out. In order for this to work, however, I needed to get others on board.

You would think that because I work for myself, I would have the ability to change my meetings, right? Well, not exactly. Working for yourself is a fancy way of saying that you work for multiple customers at the same time.

So, as I came to this conclusion about the horribleness of Mondays, I decided to ask my team members and clients if we could change the Monday meetings and deadlines altogether. It went something like this:

“Jane, I love our Monday meetings, and I think it’s important to have them at the beginning of the week, but it’s causing me a little stress. Ideally, I need a few hours to prepare for this meeting with the agenda and last week’s action items update, but I’ve been having to do them on Sunday. I would prefer to have a little bit more time on Monday morning to prepare. Is it OK if we move this meeting to Tuesday or Wednesday?”

Nine times out of 10 the client was OK with the change. I moved all my team members one-on-ones to the middle of the week, and life got better. The clients who didn’t want to change the Monday meeting did agree to move it later in the day.

It was a total game changer.

It took me a long time to come to the realization that my best work is done when I can plan for the week properly and come up with creative solutions to do the work that’s on my plate. If I start Monday off with a ton of things that I’m already behind on, then I lose my best chance to do great work.

This can work for others as well. Use this day to clear out your inbox, respond back to starred emails that you’ve been ignoring and set time aside to actually plan for the rest of the week. I now use Mondays as my writing day and getting ahead of anything else I need to do for the week.

Express the importance of freeing up Monday to work on the activities that matter the most and leave time to plan for the rest of the week. You might even find that you look forward to Mondays if you are doing truly valuable and worthwhile tasks on that day.

It’s a change that takes some effort to implant at the office, but when done successfully, you’ll see yourself and your team grow. Mondays will be much more enjoyable.