If you’re looking for an in-depth examination of the latest office trend, we hate to disappoint you with something short and to the point. But hey, it’s “bare-minimum Monday.”
That’s the newest workplace buzz phrase gaining attention, following such others as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting and loud layoffs. It means just what its name implies: taking it easy on the first day of the workweek as a kind of coping mechanism.
Marisa Jo Mayes, a TikTok creator who works for herself, is credited with coining the term and popularizing it. As she shared in an Insider story, she was experiencing the “Sunday scaries” — that is, dreading the workweek ahead — and “realized something had to change.”
Her solution: to do, well, the bare minimum on Monday.
“I don’t take meetings and take it slow for the first two hours. I’ll do some reading, some journaling, maybe some stuff around the house,” Mayes explained. “It’s two hours of no technology — no checking email — just doing whatever I need to do to feel good starting my day.”
Mayes has gotten plenty of viral-like attention for her buzz phrase — and some are taking the concept seriously. “It’s a real thing,” said CNN’s chief business correspondent, Christine Romans.
Still, others are suggesting bare-minimum Monday has its limits.
“It’s all well and good thinking ‘I’m just going to do some light filing and tidy my desk’ but what happens if the project you are working on hits an unexpected but enormous obstacle? What if your colleague is off sick and you need to cover their responsibilities?” wrote Martha Alexander in a column for the Evening Standard.
Alexander also made the point that bare-minimum Monday (or BMM, as it’s sometimes referred to) isn’t exactly a new thing: “Who hasn’t had a hectic, heavy weekend and found themselves sitting at their desk on a Monday morning thinking, ‘I just need to survive the next eight hours’ and quietly accepting this is not going to be the most dynamic day of their career?”
In the Insider story, Mayes said she’s gotten her share of criticism, especially from those who suggest she’s “an entitled millennial who doesn’t know the value of hard work.” She added that bare-minimum Monday “isn’t realistic for everybody.”
But she sticks by her essential point — that we shouldn’t put too much pressure on ourselves at the start of the workweek. In the end, she suggested, the starting-slow approach might make all of us more productive.
“I get more done when easing the pressure,” she said.
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