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10 Minutes on Friday That Will Make Your Monday 10 Times Easier

Improve each week before it even begins

Laura Vanderkam
Forge
3 min readJan 14, 2021

Photo: Poh Kim Yeoh/EyeEm/Getty Images

For most of us, Monday mornings look like this: You grab your coffee, go to your computer, look at your calendar and your inbox and ask yourself, “Okay, what should I do?” You think through the upcoming week. You get a sense of timing and what’s on your plate.

Monday morning might seem like a great time to plan. It is, after all, the start of the week. Many teams even have a recurring meeting on Monday morning to hash out the week’s workflow.

However, devoting Monday morning to planning exacts a huge opportunity cost that can be avoided by choosing a different time. Move your planning to Friday: Simply spend some time each Friday listing out the most important priorities for the week ahead (those will now get done first thing on Monday morning), and emailing any requests for meetings that need to happen throughout the week. Here’s why:

You probably already dislike Mondays

We know Mondays have a bad reputation; in any given poll, they are at least roughly tied for least favorite day of the week. They tend not to be the most productive day of the week either. One Accountemps survey found that 39% of HR managers said their employees were most…

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Published in Forge

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Laura Vanderkam
Laura Vanderkam

Written by Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management books including Off the Clock and 168 Hours. She blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

Responses (25)

What are your thoughts?

To me, Friday’s are about wrapping up and getting tasks done that didn’t get done during the week. And of course – ideally unplugging early! Planning for me happens on Sunday. This is the best day – late afternoon usually – because I’m already starting to plan for returning to work.

Hello Laura,
Nice little article that won me ever instantly. My 'Friday’ is Thursday, but I will start the practice next week.
I think there is another weekend related upside to this planning ahead: you clear your mind of things that will otherwise…

But I am willing to think about what “future me” should do

When I was in sales I always prodded clients a little bit about next steps on Friday afternoons. I’d often get appointments, etc. from folks who had been dragging their feet. I realize now I was appealing to their “future me" mindset.