When Tuesday Begins to Feel like Wednesday

Photo credit: www.bluewaikiki.com, CC BY 2.0.

If you’re at work on Tuesday and it feels like you’re already in the middle of the workweek, it might be because you’ve fallen into a routine of getting a jump on Monday by starting work on Sunday. Beth Teitell writes about this phenomenon in The Boston Globe:

Now, by many accounts, Sunday night has become the new Monday morning. In 2014, 32 percent of workers polled by Gallup said their employers generally expect them to check e-mail and stay in touch remotely outside of normal business hours.

“Everything is blending into everything,” said Stewart Friedman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“We’re in the very early days of the digital era,” he said, “and we have not yet mastered the psychological and social tools that are needed to harness the incredible power of these digital tools that enable us to be connected anytime anywhere with anyone.”

I’ve certainly fallen into this routine, and judging by the number of posts I see being drafted in our backend on Sunday, I know that Nicole and Ester are using the last of their weekend hours getting a jump on the workweek as well.

It’s true that the digital era has affected the way we think about work and our ability to disconnect; anyone who has their work email on their personal phone knows this. My father worked long hours at an auto company, but the physicality of his job meant that he couldn’t bring his work home. If he wanted to work on the weekend, he would have to physically be at work (and he sometimes was), but Sundays were usually quiet — a welcome time of inactivity before the arrival of Monday, when the real work would begin again.

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