The case for Summer Mondays

In the seminal 1999 work-culture movie Office Space, everyman anti-hero Peter Gibbons thoroughly despises his job. It's a string of bad-employment cliches — from the overly formal yet moronic TPS Reports to the meetings with corporate drones tasked with "efficiency" (which really means firing people) to the unctuous, glad-handing boss. It is from this movie that a handy expression was popularized, spreading across the land via endless verbal repetitions from our younger brothers and, later, across the internet in the form of gifs and memes: "Uh oh, sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays!"

"A case of the Mondays" is not mere meta-irony. It's not just a way to mock the dopes who say it while also attempting to repossess the rampant existential tyranny of a day in which people going back to work are intrinsically bound to feel less good than they did at the start of the weekend. A case of the Mondays is a real thing. Mondays are not only anecdotally depressing, there are statistics to go with them — for instance, a study by, um, Marmite, which found that most of us don't smile until 11:16 a.m. on Monday because we find "the start of the week so demoralizing."

This is why I suggest dumping the Summer Friday, or what's left of it, and implementing the Summer Monday instead.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

I know, I know, this proposal may be met with vacant stares. But I have real points. Bear with me.

First, a brief history of Summer Fridays, for those who have never benefited from this tradition: At some point in the '80s (or maybe the '90s?), they became matters of semi-ritual, expected in certain industries, disdained in others. The deal was, you could leave early on Friday, or maybe not come in at all, if that Friday happened between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and if you got your work done (intoned ominously via email from A Human Resources Professional).

Summer Friday was not a strings-free reward, of course. It was a way to get employees to work harder during the rest of the week while allowing their bosses the opportunity to avoid sitting in traffic while heading to their country houses. Summer Fridays, you might say, were a manipulation, though one you could never bite back at because, for goodness' sake, of course you were going to take the opportunity to leave the office a little early, even if you'd never set foot inside a country house.

As Choire Sicha details in a terrific piece in The New York Times Magazine, Summer Fridays are quickly becoming a thing of the past in 24-Hour Blogville, where we are connected all the time and can work from wherever we happen to be Dear God. Maybe it's too late to save Summer Fridays. Let's make delightfully refreshing lemonade out of that lemon and turn our attention to Summer Mondays instead. That means from Memorial Day to Labor Day, you only work a half day on Mondays — or maybe you don't work at all.

(I will stop here and say that because I am writing about Summer Mondays, I will save my argument for the four-day workweek for another time. But let it be known that I do think we are all working too hard. It strains me to keep up with some of you. Plus, three-day weekends are obviously the best.)

Monday owes us. It's the worst day of the week, hands down.

People have been dealing with their Monday situations long before relatively comfy offices with air conditioning and ergonomic chairs and Ron Livingston and standing desks ever existed. Even children know the classic office nursery rhyme: "Friday's great! Monday's barely endurable! Wednesday's 'hump day!'" The trouble with Mondays goes way back.

In the 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word Mondayishness suggested "the lethargy or disinclination resulting from a busy or eventful weekend or from having to resume work after the weekend." ("Your letter has cheered my 'Mondayishness,'" wrote George Gilfillan in 1850.) Gilfillan was a minister, so suffering was sort of his beat, but why have the rest of us simply agreed to live with Mondayishness?

Work is never going to be most people's favorite thing in the whole world. ("Looks like you've been missing a lot of work." "I wouldn't say I've been missing it, Bob.") But imagine a week free of the dreaded Sunday blues, those nights you're filled with ennui about your life choices, or maybe can't sleep at all thinking about how you're about to be jettisoned into the week — trial by fire! — whether you like it or not. You could really use an extra day, or at least an extra few hours of relaxation and gentleness and sleep, to prepare yourself to work really hard on that coming Tuesday, which you would do, you really would, if only you had a little more time to get there.

Imagine a week in which Monday was a blessedly brief four hours long. You show up at 9 a.m., but hey, the Mondayishness is gone, because you'll be out of here at 1 p.m. — just in time to drink your lunch. Or maybe you don't even show up until 1 p.m. Or maybe, just maybe — dare to dream! — you don't show up at all. What a way to start the week! Breathe in the deep, salty, soothing ocean air, because that's where you could be sitting on Monday.

What about the loss of productivity, you say? Well, rest easy, you capitalist automaton: Tuesday is already our most productive day of the week, say the experts.

Hey, I know what you're going to say, so let me say it for you: "If you only work a half day Monday — or take the entire Monday off, you lazy slob — then doesn't your Tuesday become a Monday, and the problem starts all over again? Don't you simply get the Monday night blues, and become awash in Tuesdayishness?" Well, no. Because, first, you'll be more productive if you work less, and second, Tuesday is Tuesday, not Monday. Who has a case of the Tuesdays? No one. Plus, according to that study by Marmite, there are five decent ways to get over your horrible Monday feeling: 1. Watching TV; 2. Sex; 3. Online shopping; 4. Buying chocolate or make-up; 5. Planning a holiday. Can you do those at work? Not, generally, without attracting the attention of your bosses. But you can do them on a Summer Monday.

Given that survey I mentioned about Tuesday's superior productivity, how about just going from 0 to 60 like a real car owner instead of plodding through the first day of the week like you're a petulant teen at driving school before you finally hit the gas and start to make tracks?

Friday is already a great day. I'll admit, the biggest reason to defend Summer Friday is emotional. It feels right. You're ready for the weekend, so why not kick it off a little early? Friday, Friday, it's like you're channeling the very best part of Rebecca Black all day, and in that delirious, ridiculous fog it's nothing to come in for a bit and leave at, say, 3. What productivity loss — and what joyous gain for all? — is that? But that's why the workers of America should demand more. We have settled for too little. You don't even need a Summer Friday to make you feel better about your life on Friday. Even if you get out of work on Friday at 5, or 6, or even 7 during the summer, there are hours of light left to live! People are happy! The streets sing with possibility and margaritas and coconut sunscreen.

Compare that to Monday, when you're better off just being in bed in the morning because someone is definitely going to spill coffee on your shirt before you even put it on. And working on Fridays is actually sort of fun in the summer because of all the people who aren't there, either in the office or your entire city. Everyone knows: It's the Monday folks you need to avoid.

Rebecca Greenfield recently wrote an excellent guide to getting out of the office on a Summer Friday without attracting the attention of your boss or seeming to shirk work. But that underlines some of the problem of a Summer Friday, and exactly how they get you. Once you're in the office, a stupor sets in. People ask you things, you work, and it can be very, very hard to leave, particularly at the end of the week when your defenses are down and you're exhausted. Who hasn't just sat at their cubicle for an hour after being able to legitimately go, just staring at their computer screen and looking for likes on Twitter because everything in life just seems a little bit meh now? Compare that to simply not going to work until, say, 1 p.m. on a Monday (or skipping the whole day and starting fresh on Tuesday! Details TBD per you and your employer!) Then you can enjoy your Friday evening and your Monday too, in the knowledge that even if you work a full Friday, you won't see the office again until Tuesday — Tuesday!. Heed the words of the perfectly named Katie Sleep, who started a company in which she lets employees set their own schedules, and who told NPR, "Work cannot be everything. People who have their lives are far better workers."

And people who have Summer Mondays are far better at not having a case of the Mondays. While we're at it, let's not confine this to a season. A Summer Monday would feel really good in December, too.