It’s pointless posting this now.
In fact, it’s pointless posting any content anywhere… or sending an email… or making a phone call.
Why?
Because, on Friday, after 2pm (in the UK, at the very least), everything … starts… to .. slow… right… down.
The weekend is looming large, and most people, after lunch, simply develop a ‘f**k it’ mentality: silly posts go up on social media (animals grinning, wine bottle/glass memes, Vines of kids dancing), ‘banter’ flies back n forth, pubs and bars are talked about, someone throws a foam stress pig (or other animal) across the office.
In fact, there’s a general move towards wishing the week away, getting it out of the way as quickly as possible: the notion that ‘Thursday is the new Friday’ has been around for some time, and Wednesday is ‘hump day’ i.e the middle of the week. Once you’re over ‘the hump’, you’re on your way to Friday.
All we need now is to refer to Tuesday as ‘hump day eve’, and we’ve nearly written off the entire working week.
There are a few things that are strange about this:
1. ‘The weekend’ is a man-made concept. We only know of the end of the week being Saturday and Sunday, because that’s what we’ve been told since we were born. The weekend could just as easily be Tuesday and Wednesday.
In fact, in Dubai the weekend is Friday and Saturday: Sunday is a working day.
2. Although there are many things we’d rather do (spend time with friends/family/our kids, pursue hobbies, go on holiday), a full-time job takes up – as a bare minimum – five days of the week: how terrible that we’re constantly looking to get to the end of something which takes up 70% of our time. Are we all so unhappy in, and disengaged by, what we do that by Tuesday we want it to be Friday?
3. Possibly the most important point (for me, anyway): imagine how much more work we could get done, and how less stressful our lives would be, if we didn’t see Thursday as ‘the new Friday’, and didn’t sack off work (mentally, if not physically) just after midday on Friday.
Imagine how much easier the following Monday would be, if we’d worked harder for three hours on Friday – just between 2 – 5pm – so that we didn’t have as much clutter to wade through, the following week.
It’s interesting. We wish our working week away, but how much easier could we make each working week, if we weren’t in such a rush to finish the previous one?