Bare Minimum Mondays: a perfect start to the week – or a recipe for disaster?

Name: Bare Minimum Mondays

Age: 11 months.

Appearance: Easy like Sunday morning, but for the whole of Monday.

For goodness sake, is Gen Z pretending to have invented slacking off again? Not at all. Don’t think of Bare Minimum Mondays as slacking off. Think of it as protective self-care.

OK, that sounds pretty sensible. So what does a Bare Minimum Monday consist of? Easy. It’s basically just slacking off.

Damn you, Gen Z! But only on Mondays. And for a well-argued scientific reason.

What’s that? Sometimes people have the Sunday Scaries.

The what? You know, the Sunday Scaries. You spend Sunday dreading the brutal relentlessness of the working week ahead, so when you wake up on Monday you’re already emotionally drained. It’s a nightmare.

I mean, it isn’t really. So what better way to ease yourself into the week than by half-arsing it as much as possible on a Monday?

I bet your boss hates you. You misunderstand. You still work on a Bare Minimum Monday, but give yourself permission to do only essential work. Stick to your contractual obligations, basically.

Hold on, isn’t this quiet quitting? No, quiet quitting is when you do Bare Minimum Monday on days that are not Monday, as well as on Monday.

Gen Z needs to stop making up names for things that already exist. It makes sense, though. According to the video creator Marisa Jo, who first coined the term, it’s a great way to get lots of admin done, setting yourself up for a more productive week.

Doesn’t that just condense the rest of your work into the last four days of the week? Ah, I understand why you would think that, but that’s because you don’t know about Trickle-Down Tuesdays.

What’s that? I just made it up. It’s where you don’t work very hard on Tuesdays, to counteract all the Sunday Scaries that now happen on a Monday.

So now you have three days to do everything. Well, no, because I’ve also invented Wind-Down Wednesdays, when you don’t do much work either. And Thunderstruck Thursdays, when you are stunned into inaction by all the items left on your to-do list.

But you still have Friday. Oh, you mean Freakout Friday, when you work yourself into a state of unimaginable stress because you spent the whole week clowning around and now have to exhaust yourself to do all the things you could have done on Monday? Yes, I still have that.

Do say: “I think I’m going to indulge in some Bare Minimum Monday today.”

Don’t say: “Which is very easy, since I was recently fired.”