Why “No Meeting Mondays” can Save your Mental Health

When you work from home, you get to set your own schedule, and that’s a beautiful thing, as long as you remember that YOU and you alone are in charge of making sure you don’t let anyone else impose their agenda onto yours.

In order to create and maintain whitespace in our lives, we need to create boundaries with our calendars. The best way I’ve found to do this is to institute what I call “No-Meeting” Mondays.

In the past few months I’ve been focusing on mental health and ending an addition to workaholism.

One way I’ve done this is by instituting (and following!) my “No Meeting Monday” rule which allows the first day of the workweek to be spent getting ready for a crazy busy Tuesday – Thursday run.

Essentially, I could say I’m having a 3-Day Workweek (a la the 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss) but that’s not really accurate since I’m still working on Mondays.

So what does a “No Meeting Monday” look like?

A “No Meeting” Monday means that while I might not be taking phone calls or getting on Zoom for consulting/mentoring sessions, I’m busy:

Working on my brand,
Updating my website,
Creating and scheduling social media posts,
Preparing for the week’s Platinum Literary client calls,
Writing articles,
Writing blog posts,
Writing social media updates,
Working on my own “writings,”
Working on Serious Write to-dos,
Planning for the week,
Checking email,
Goal-setting, and
Evaluating the prior week.

By keeping Monday open for these tasks, it means I have Saturday and Sunday free to be with my family.

Sundays are no longer stressful or giving me that “ugh” feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think about how busy the start of the week is.

On the flip side, because I keep Monday free from meetings, it means I stack them on Tuesday – Thursday…which means those days are VERY BUSY days, particularly Tuesdays.

But you know what, this system allows me to create whitespace in my week and I love it.

This is my new normal and I’m not going back.

How about you? Do you have one day a week that you protect so you can work on your brand, your writing, or just to catch up?

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