Fridays Are the New Mondays

It’s 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, and I’m Slacking my co-workers at Medium.

One is editing a story. One is doing… I’m not sure what, but tapping away furiously on his keyboard. I’m trying to finish writing this story. In our Slack chat, we all agree it is too late and a little too dark to still be at the office. But we’re only just wrapping up our to-do lists.

When did our last day of the work week go from TGIF to a frantic race against the clock? Why do Fridays suddenly feel like Mondays?

Friday’s lack of chill has a lot to do with the new pace of an “always on” workplace and its effects on time management, says Rebecca Fraser-Thill, a career coach.

“We’re so used to getting information streamed at us all the time, we expect or think that we should have the same in the workplace, too,” she says of our never-ending, meeting-heavy, Slack-happy, I’ll-follow-up-with-an-email culture. There’s a “fear of missing out,” even at work — if you’re not in that meeting or on that email thread, you might worry that your work is going unnoticed or you’re being sidelined. So you pile your day with more meetings, which leaves little time for quality, productive, invigorating work.

“I’m a big believer in Cal Newport’s Deep Work,” Fraser-Thill says. “We don’t engage in as much deep work as we used to, meaning we don’t have time to really think about what we’re doing. We’re always multitasking, squeezing in bits of work between meetings.”

Another factor in my Friday predicament predates today’s internet culture. It’s the “planning fallacy,” identified by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1979, by which we tend to vastly underestimate how long we’ll need to get something done. “We’re far too optimistic,” says Dawna Ballard, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Texas and a scholar of chronemics, or how our perceptions of time affect communication.

Ballard specifically investigates four types of work: concentration, creation, cultivation, and commotion. Ideally, you’d have some kind of balance of the four — time to focus on somewhat manual but practical and important work, like data analysis (concentration); time to do something creative that needs time to unfold, like writing (creation); chats with co-workers or collaborators at lunches or one-on-one meetings (cultivation); and time to handle unexpected problems or issues (commotion). Sounds like a great week, right?

“No one has a list on Monday that doesn’t get expanded.”

What we tend to underestimate is the power of commotion — the disruptions, snafus, or hiccups that inevitably interfere with our best-laid plans for the week ahead. And maybe there used to be a world where a commotion was just an occasional problem that slightly disrupted your flow state. Now, however, commotion is a constant, and it comes from all directions.

“Email becomes a constant interruption,” Ballard says. “You’re working on a project or doing some thoughtful thing, but now there’s an email and you feel compelled to respond to it. And, in some companies, you are compelled to respond to it.”

The unending, immediate access that our colleagues have to our days via Slack, texts, and our inboxes causes our to-do lists to unravel and our priorities to pile up. “That’s the norm,” Ballard says. “No one has a list on Monday that doesn’t get expanded.”

And as many have lamented, today’s work-from-anywhere office culture means you can’t leave it all at the office. Why set a hard 5:30 p.m. deadline if you can Slack from the train, go back and forth on email from the grocery store aisles, or sign back on to wrap things up in a shared Google doc on the couch after dinner?

Of course, there’s also plain old procrastination to blame for the Friday scaries. “Work fills to fit the time allotted,” Fraser-Thill says. “If we give ourselves a week for something that could be a day, it will somehow take a week.”

As a coach specializing in helping clients with time management and prioritization, Fraser-Thill posed this question to me: “Why do your Fridays feel so busy?” I didn’t have a good answer, but I did say that when I arrive at certain tasks on Friday afternoons, I often have an overwhelming palm-to-forehead moment of “What have I been waiting for?”

That is a very common underlying question, Fraser-Thill says. “We don’t do things for no reason… There’s some reward that we’re getting from our behavior.” It could be the belief that “I work better under pressure” and the accompanying adrenaline rush of down-to-the-wire work. It could be that we gain some social affirmation from the performance of busyness: Complain-bragging is a thing, after all.

And for millennials, like me, working all the time is a cultural imperative. As the screenwriter Jonny Sun put it in a tweet: “[Millennial] culture is knowing that the only difference between weekdays and weekends is that you have more time to get work done on weekends.” A 2016 survey of 19,000 millennials globally found that more than half expected to work past age 65. Twelve percent expect to work until the day they die. Which is dark—and a recipe for burnout.

I had several weeks to let all of this marinate because (since “work fills to fit the time allotted”) I kept pushing off this story. And it led me down a bit of an existential rabbit hole: What if, in the workplace of the future, Monday doesn’t exist? And the weekday is a limitless expanse of time, and your to-do list grows like the ultimate pharmacy receipt? And no one says “TGIF” anymore because you can’t “TG” it’s “Friday” if we can just Slack each other via microchips implanted in our brains anytime of the day or night?

Until then, I’m going to pretend that Thursday is the new Friday — and try to get my real Fridays back.