This is the Best Day of the Week to Work From Home

I hate Mondays

When I write "hate," I mean that I loathe, despise, abhor, and generally detest Mondays.

As a local government employee for going on twenty-nine years and rapidly approaching the past seventeen working for the same city, I have spent quite a lot of Mondays at work serving as a warrant clerk (arrest warrants, not draws on funds), adult probation officer, economic development coordinator, and economic development director.

Should we want to know about how many Mondays, a decent approximation would be to multiply twenty-eight by fifty-two and subtract about ten per year based on holidays and vacation days, as I prefer to take Mondays off when I take one day off in a week.

When you multiply forty-two by twenty-nine, you arrive at about 1,200 Mondays that I have trudged off to work, often lamenting my lot in life and not having made something more of myself.

Like millions of other employees, over weekends I am generally more content and relaxed. My mind races with possibilities and scenarios for launching businesses, writing books, making bold investments, and generally becoming what one of the thousands of books that I have read, The Weekend Millionaire Mindset by Mike Sumney, suggests. Someone who utilizes weekends to strive for financial independence.

Alas, I wind up spending the bulk of my weekends attending to family- and home-related tasks, and the remainder of what constitutes my free time relaxing while telling myself that I deserve a little break before returning to the grind.

So if you were to give me carte blanche insofar as to what day of the week I could work remotely, the choice would be a no-brainer.

I do not think that I would miss returning to City Hall or any other office or place of business ever again on a Monday morning.

If there is something that I might hate even more than trudging off to my office on a Monday morning to begin a stressful week of trying to maintain and grow a struggling economy for the city that employs me, it is this freakin’ pandemic.

I will skip all the ways that I hate it but suffice it to say that it has wrought havoc on many loved ones and is a severe strain on my own continued well-being.

Financially, my family is among the fortunate ones that continue faring okay, as all of us are homeowners and investors, thus have benefitted from the run-up in housing prices as well as the growth in our portfolios.

In 2020, my own nuclear family banked $12,000 more than what we spent due to a number of pandemic-related factors, mostly the lack of taking any vacations.

One other positive thing that came out of the pandemic is that many of us, myself included, were allowed to work remotely for the first time in our careers.

For those in their mid-twenties who are just starting out with our city, they now take it for granted that they are periodically allowed to work from the comfort of their homes.

For old hands like me, it is something that never in our wildest dreams would we imagine would have happened.

It is not as if I am a computer analyst, like my good friend who works in the IT department for Blue Cross Blue Shield. He has been working remotely on a periodic basis for well over ten years and still, as of January 2022 as I write this, has not yet returned to his office in the tower on East Randolph in downtown Chicago where his company is headquartered.

In the city where I am employed, we returned from remote work on June 1st of 2020, so we are already twenty months back into our old routine, but with one exception.

Our city manager adopted the policy that those of us in more technical, or professional if you will, positions could continue working remotely on occasion, with a plan in place and multiple sign-offs.

It should go without saying that out of the two hundred or so employees in our city, there are only about a dozen of us who can do this. There is no such thing as a police officer, public works employee, code enforcement officer, building inspector, or front counter clerk staff who can perform their job duties remotely.

Are most of them jealous of those of us who can still work from home occasionally? What do you think?

When my city formalized the remote work policy in the fall of 2020, my boss knew right away how much I detest Mondays, particularly our long and boring staff meeting where I must feign interest while some other employees whose tasks do not relate to my own whatsoever drone on about their projects.

Right away, he told me that I could not work remotely on Mondays and also discouraged me from Thursdays, too, which was a bit of a disappointment.

I had long considered Thursday to be kind of an “in-between” day, sandwiched between what had long been my most productive day of the week, Wednesday, filled with meetings and ticking off items from my to-do list like a machine, and Friday, where I do not mind coming into work and spend parts of the day chilling and saying “Thank God It’s Friday” to a lot of people or agreeing when they say it to me.

So I had first considered working remotely on Thursdays, just to get a step closer to the best workday of the week, but it turns out that my boss had been considering coming in that day every week and we make a lot of calls to developers and businesses together that day.

So for now, Thursdays are becoming one of my more productive and busier days of the week, along with Mondays and Tuesdays.

After thinking a bit more about it, it dawned on me that this particular day, as I sit home in my sweats and type these words while the VPN is open on another tab, is the absolute best and most perfect day to work from home.

Two Two-Day Weeks

I am not going to admit, even here as an anonymous writer, that I am not working hard. But I will admit that I am not working quite as hard as I would be if I was dressed in business casual attire and sitting, or more likely still standing, in my office.

I will not admit that I consider the weeks that I work remotely on Wednesdays to more closely resemble two two-day work weeks with a much-appreciated mental health break in between.

Not to mention that I work in a conservative community where many anti-maskers are not only elected and appointed officials, but many of the business owners, property owners, and developers hold the same opinion.

So as long as I am coming into the office and sitting through meetings four out of five days per week, I suppose that it does not matter if there is one day per week when I remain safely ensconced in our home instead of coming into contact with others whose COVID status is unknown.

As more people are vaccinated, I certainly worry less about it than I did months ago, but I still prefer skipping the commute and all the other stuff that comes with spending eight or more hours in an office setting.

Truth is, when I can pension out of doing this kind of work, I look forward to some other semi- or post-retirement kind of gig where I can interact with others or do actual physical work in an outdoor setting and never sit through another staff meeting, economic development committee meeting, or city council meeting ever again.

Just about six years to go!

Obviously, judging by the title, I ultimately wound up working from home, or WFH, on most, but not all, Wednesdays.

For instance, many of the aforementioned meetings are beyond my control. A few weeks ago, I had planned on working from home on Wednesday, but my boss scheduled a meeting with a grocery store prospect that I have been trying to recruit to town in the afternoon.

Since that is our number-one targeted business at this time, far be it for me to remind him “Boss, I am supposed to chill, I mean work, from home that day.”

Since the meeting was set up on Monday, I worked remotely that Tuesday, just to ensure that I was able to take the one day per week of remote work that was coming to me. If I came in Tuesday and Wednesday, chances are that my opportunity to work remotely that week would be gone.

So sometimes I work from home on Tuesdays, just to make sure that I do get at least one WFH day per week. But I prefer Wednesdays.

Why?

It’s quite simple.

Reasons include that it breaks up the week nicely: two days in the office, one day working remotely, and then two more days back in the office. This leads to a consistent workflow that balances a number of planning meetings early in the week, a sometimes productive Wednesday working from home, and two equally productive and collaborative days on the tail end of the week. (Quartz at Work)

WFH days on Wednesdays rather than on Mondays or Fridays prevents employees from thinking of them as faux three-day weekends. WFH Wednesday is still a workday after all, and the fact that employees are required to be back in the office on Thursday reinforces accountability.

As a pre-pandemic article in Fast Company accurately states, by working from home on Wednesdays, you’re never more than two days from respite. This comes into play for me on many a stressful Monday, when I remind myself that I am less than two days away from my mini “working break” as I think of it.

Taking a midweek telecommuting day breaks up the week and alleviates a midweek slump. I typically report back to work Thursday mornings fired up and ready to go, set to take on a day-and-a-half worth of challenges. I would be lying if I wrote that I do my best work on Friday afternoons although sometimes I am forced to — but you can count on me to go “all in” on Thursdays and Fridays until around 2 PM.

Allowing work-from-home Wednesday has promoted a better work-life balance for me. I will not go out and spend hours doing something not work-related, but I have shuttled my kids to and from appointments, dropped my sweet baby off at the groomers and picked her up on Wednesdays, have walked to the grocery store to pick up some items during my lunch break, and do more mundane things like paying bills on the mid-week day working from home.

Also, I might add that having been a hard-working grinder for most of my twenty-eight years of working, I am constantly approaching my limit for accruing vacation days.

As such, I have been taking individual days and portions of days here and there in addition to working from home on Wednesdays. I am currently planning on taking Monday, January 17th, off, and going for a nice massage that day to boot.

So these days, logging into our ninety-minute-long staff meeting around 9 AM every Monday morning and then spending the next hour or so responding to dozens of emails that I likely ignored on Friday afternoon, continued to pour in over the weekend, and the others that figured would attract my attention by sending it first thing Monday, I do not feel so bad as I prepare for the meetings to come in the afternoon, possibly at night, and all day on Tuesday.

I remind myself that in two short days, I will not bother shaving and will throw on my old sweats and sip coffee with my wife in the morning instead of preparing for the office and sitting in suburban traffic.

Although it would be nice to claim that I am just as committed to work and as productive on these Wednesdays as I am on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, I do not want to lie and diminish my credibility.

If I do two hours of work on a WFH Wednesday, that may be a stretch.

After all, after chillin’ a bit and simply responding to the inquiries that come my way on Wednesday, I know that I will return with guns blazing and a fresh mug of Joe in my hand bright and early the next day.

And with only two more workdays before my next break.