The latest TikTok work trend has you making a conscious choice to do the least on a Monday
Who among us hasn’t woken up on a miserable Monday morning and instantly thought of the words of the pre-eminent scholar of Mondays, Garfield Arbuckle, when he said, simply, “I hate Mondays.”
That attitude is the germ at the heart of the latest viral TikTok work trend, which much like the other viral TikTok work trends, is about how to do as little as possible. This time, it’s Bare Minimum Mondays — which really needs no further explanation.
The trend started when Marisa Jo Mayes, a self-employed TikToker, made a video about her Monday routine, which involves…not a lot. A couple hours of reading, then some journaling, absolutely no meetings and maybe after lunch an hour or two of work.
“One day last March, I gave myself permission to do the absolute bare minimum for work, and it was like some magic spell came over me,” Mayes told Business Insider. “I felt better. I wasn’t overwhelmed, and I actually got more done than I expected. I’ve done Bare Minimum Monday every week since.”
If you’re growing a bit dizzy trying to keep track of all these work trends, we don’t blame you. But like rage applying, and quiet quitting before that, and the Great Resignation before that, all these things ping off the same basic problem: a workplace that no longer seems to work for everyone. All of these trends, we suppose, are really just rogue attempts (in lieu of formalized ones) to rebalance the work environment in search of a better productivity balance.
Mayes is clear that this only works for her because she has the ideal schedule for it: self-employed, working from home and in a job where creativity and productivity go hand in hand. (And it’s not always easy, as one experimenter found out.)
But her belief in it also comes from the fact that it is a schedule that feels personally productive. “I get more done when easing the pressure, but I never meant for it to be a way to do more work,” she says. “It’s really a way to start the week prioritizing yourself as a person over yourself as an employee. It’s radically changed my life, not because of the productivity, but because of that self-compassion.”
Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.