I generally hate Mondays. And they’ve been getting worse because of a certain Monday afternoon meeting and an every-other-Tuesday morning meeting that I never feel prepared for.
Good news it that I think I know what I’m doing wrong… The problem appears to be that on Friday’s I don’t finish the week. I usually leave work Friday with a number of projects or emails still in an unknown state with the intention of determining their state over the weekend. While I usually, casually, chip away at those things over the weekend I usually never buckle down and get everything in order. This means the week is never over and all weekend I’m thinking about work but not actually making progress. And then on Monday morning I’m trying to clean up last week instead of getting off to a good start on the new week and then spend the rest of the week playing catchup.
My new plan is that on Friday I will plan to determine the state of everything before I leave the office. Yes, I may work on the weekend but only on discrete projects that I understand ahead of time. Not nebulous projects like “answering email.”
Of course, this all seems obvious now that I’ve thought about it and I’m sure you all do it religiously and I’m just an idiot.
In other news there were two articles recently in the New York Times business section that I enjoyed.
The first was, It may be a good job but is it good work?
And the second was, The upside of a job done well enough.
You should read Getting Things Done – the “weekly review” is a core part of the philosophy and typically scheduled on a Friday afternoon to help address some of the issues you are describing