Blue Monday Daisy
Mondays are hard. Mondays suck. Mondays: a terrible way to spend 1/7 of your life.  And frankly, I’m sick of them. Since I can’t change the calendar, I’m changing the way I approach Mondays. If you’re ready to toss the stress, consider the following ideas for beating the Monday morning blues.

Write Down One Goal and Accomplish It

Decide on the most important thing you need to get done.  You may have tons of things you need to get done, but pick the biggest challenge. Then knock it out. Even if it sucks up all your creative and mental energy for the rest of the day, you’ve made excellent use of your time and can take it a bit easy.  For more in-depth advice on this approach, check out Marc & Angel’s “I Will Do One Thing Today” to-do list.

Skip Email for an Hour or Two

A very select few folks have job duties that are truly urgent. You guys are off the hook. For the rest of us, I highly recommend avoiding email first thing Monday morning.  Your energy is better served attacking high-priority work instead of playing tag or deleting junk from your inbox. After you’ve put in some good hours and need a break, that’s the perfect time to check email.  You’ll avoid adding to your to-do list before you even get started and getting sidetracked right off the bat.

Eat Breakfast. And Lunch. And Dinner.

Your brain doesn’t fire on all cylinders until it’s been fed. So feed it.  If you don’t have time to eat, there’s a good chance you’re making excuses. It only takes about 10 minutes to enjoy a bowl of cereal and another two minutes to toss a can of soup into your bag on the way out. There’s no need stress your body and risk intense irritability to save 12 minutes.

Find an Excuse to Laugh

Laughing, even if you’re faking it, can reduce your stress levels.  So whatever your sense of humor is, find a reason to laugh. Watch people eating concrete on YouTube or check out kids’ knock-knock jokes (my personal poison).  This tip is easy to write off, but it can make a sincere difference in your stress levels, so give it a try.

Create a Two-Column To-Do List for the Week

On one side, list the items that you truly have to get done this week. No cheating: only list items that have a real deadline. (If you work on self-enforced deadlines, use your best judgement.)   On the other side, you can list things you’d like to get done.  You can use the first column to pull your priority tasks from and fill in the rest of your time with items you choose from the second column. This simplified to-do list restores a bit of choice and freedom to your work week, but ensures that the vital stuff still gets taken care of.

Take a Break

This is about having an abundance mentality. If you run constantly, you may get a lot done, but you’ll also feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day. If you let yourself take break, whether it’s 10 minutes or 30, you don’t lose a meaningful amount of time, but you do start to feel like there’s plenty of time. That feeling can ease your stress considerably, letting you focus on your work instead of just worrying about getting it all done.

Here’s one thing not to do:

Don’t Reward Yourself for Getting Through the Day

Rewarding yourself is great, but you can set up a negative pattern when you reward yourself for getting through each Monday.  That reward cements the idea that you did something challenging and difficult. In other words, it reinforces the idea that Mondays suck.  If you treat Monday like any other day, full of possibility and full of challenge, you can stop building it into a Big Huge Crappy Deal.

How do you kill the Monday blues? If you’ve got any cool tips or insights, please dive into the comments and share!

Creative Commons License photo credit: //amy//

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