Having read every BS business book out there, I thought to make up one of my own. Enjoy:
Over the last few months I’ve been posting on Facebook/Twitter how much I can’t wait for Monday to come around, usually drawing disgusting comments from my friends.
I understand their skepticism, I spent my entire life waiting for the Thursday afternoon to finish so I knew I could relax a bit, just one more day till the weekend! TGIF! Yay!
Then as I grew up, as I started to understand my life a little bit better and as I started to draw up statistical models for why things are the way they are, dig up the problems that we created intentionally or unintentionally… I found the root cause for why Monday’s sucked so bad.
The Bad Monday
Monday is one of those days that everyone is grumpy on. You have people who really hate what they have to do to earn a living, mixed with overly driven assholes that have to cope with reality of getting nothing done because they depend on the lazy bastards who hate what they have to do to earn a living so they do it as slow as humanly possible to make everyone miserable.
This vicious cycle starts and rolls on because there is no organizational direction for getting shit done. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are deadlines – the timestamp by which you are responsible to deliver a fraction of features you’ve originally agreed along with a high statistical probability that others will not notice all the stuff you skillfully buried under the features you’ve actually delivered.
As this goes on, people get trained to focus on working really hard the first part of the week while they coast through the later half.
The Good Monday
The reason most people hate Monday’s is not because Monday’s by any means suck any more than any other day of the week – it is because people naturally slack throughout the week and only focus on the “need to do” stuff on a Monday morning. Even if they don’t, others bring problems to them.
You know the saying – “Let’s do it next week” or “Due next week” – generally that means Monday and that usually means working some over the weekend, etc. Not a way to go through life.
So for OWN, Monday falls on Friday. All of our big projects, big marketing, big deliverables – come on Friday’s. We break our butt throughout the week and get to gloat about it on Monday.
Monday’s then become overly satisfying because that is when the really exciting stuff really happens. It gives us energy to push forward. If we have a day ruined by dropping the ball, it gets dropped when we are all around and doesn’t interfere by ruining our weekend or sending us out on a break completely broken.
It also makes work a lot more enjoyable and exciting, because people look forward to working on the stuff instead of being beaten down by stuff that doesn’t work.
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It took us many years to bring our business to the level where we decided to make a flip.
The beauty is, you can make this happen in only one week of solid 5 days of work. This way, you can be excited about the Monday and when everyone calls you on Monday to bitch at you about things that they always have issues with, you can have a solution for them and make them feel better too. Worth a try… or you can just stay miserable on Monday’s and wait for the weekend. Life is a bit too short to give up 1/7th of it though.
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