Now that it’s Tuesday, you are a champion of the week, right? You totally owned Monday and all its productivity challenges. You actually smashed productivity in little Monday’s face, which set you up for the uphill that is Tuesday and this week’s heroic work.
Or maybe you didn’t. And that is okay.
Anne Lamott says in her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life that Mondays and Decembers are always bad times to start a writing project. She says to save yourself the effort – don’t even try to start your project on a Monday, and DEFINITELY don’t try on a Monday in December.
So the advice in this post is to try to convince your boss to give you every Monday off for the rest of forever, because it’s just a bad day to work.
No. That’s not it. Because maybe you are a magic Monday worker. Or maybe you aren’t. This is just a little reminder to accept the reality that every day isn’t a champion work day, and we can’t live in the guilt of Mondays that drags down the rest of the week.
If you ruined the morning with too many cups of coffee and articles about technology in beta, there is still the afternoon. If you shot your to-do list in the foot because you spent the whole day organizing your to-do list, you’re not going to die. If you can’t get yourself to make anything worthwhile after 1 p.m., you better start getting up at 4 a.m. so you have the rest of the day to enjoy. Stand on your head. Move locations to spark creativity. Talk to yourself out loud until you believe that your inevitable limitations will only stop you from getting work done if you let them.
You made it through Monday, with its Monday-ness and all. But now Tuesday is here and we’ve got work to do. Let’s go.