"Bare Minimum Monday": What Sports Can Teach Us About the Latest Workplace Trend

“Bare Minimum Monday” isn’t new. It’s a new term for an approach that has been around for a while but is not regularly practiced.

That approach is energy management, a term that’s bound to be more popular around the office than saying “I’m practicing Bare Minimum Monday,” at least with your supervisors.

Here’s where Bare Minimum Monday came from, what it’s about, and how to embrace it in a healthy way that will nourish your career and yourself, rather than stall it. Understanding this is critical for managers too.

About Bare Minimum Monday

“Bare Minimum Monday” is described as when a worker decides to do the “bare minimum” on Mondays. This definition prompts eye rolls and Gen Z griping because, yes, it started trending on TikTok after first being popularized by Marisa Jo Mayes in 2022.

Mayes is an entrepreneur and she decided to create for herself, “Bare Minimum Monday” as a way to curb the Sunday Scaries and beat a sense of burnout that would creep up by the end or even the middle of the week. It might also be helpful to know that she said in her interview with Insider that she is neurodivergent, a population that can be more prone to burnout.

She told Insider that she was in a cycle of “stress and burnout” even after quitting her job and going into self-employment. She would be exhausted by the end of the week and couldn’t get done what she needed to. So she’d make a very long to-do list for Mondays to catch up. Only that would cause her to dread Mondays because she knew what she had set herself up for.

To break the cycle, she gave herself permission to do the bare minimum and the overwhelm went away. For her, this means no meetings, two focused hours of main work tasks, a two-hour technology break, creative work, housework, and whatever else she needs to do to set herself up for a more productive, but steady week.

The approach resonated and started trending with employees across the social platform and beyond bringing us to today, with HR Blogs and news outlets covering the trend with various opinions.

The term sets itself up for a negative backlash, in my opinion, because it easily lends itself to a negative connotation.

What Mayes described was not being lazy and slacking off, which is what the term might sound like (and perhaps is what’s practiced by some not understanding what Bare Minimum Monday is really about).

What she described is a very intentional practice for setting up her week in a certain way so that she can get done what she needs to throughout the week and still have the energy at the end of the week for work that awaits. This is a sign of self-awareness, discipline, and personal mastery, not laziness. This is the practice of energy management.

Energy Management Not Time Management

Energy management is a skill, and one that most of my clients come to work with me on. We are groomed to manage our lives to the clock. However, this practice can lead to burnout.

Energy management is essentially understanding your stamina. That is a renewable resource. Time is finite. Different tasks drain or replenish your stamina. Time simply drifts away.

Developing self-awareness is one of the first steps in shifting towards an energy management practice. You need to pay attention to when you feel the most energized. What times of day? During what tasks? The answers will be different for different people, including neurodivergent and neurotypical people.

It’s not enough to say that you are a morning or evening person because different tasks affect you differently during different parts of the day.

For example, I am a morning person in the sense that I get up at 4am every day and am in bed by 8:30/9 almost every night. When I’m up, I’m up. I love the quiet mornings. That is a sacred time for me to get my workout and personal development in, and then start my work.

I love people. I’m an extrovert. But in the mornings, I’m an introvert. I do not want to talk. I don’t want to network. I want to do. Late mornings through the early evenings, I am ready for people and in fact need that interaction.

Schoolwork or heavy research can drain me, regardless of the time of day. So I tend to do it later in the day because it kills my morning vibe.

Because I am self-employed, I have a good amount of autonomy in how I structure my days, like Mayes.

I structure my days and weeks around my energy levels. These become rituals, which is the next step.

You also need to understand how you replenish your energy or stamina.

There is a reason there are so many sports analogies for life and business. Energy management is like a workout. You work out, you recover, you work out again, you recover, etc. Some days you have high intensity, some days you have moderate, and some days you have low. The recovery helps you ready yourself for each, and make sure that on the days you have a high-intensity demand you can really bring it.

If you go high intensity all the time, you get burnout.

To carry this analogy further, think of Bare Minimum Mondays as the warm-up for your week’s workout. Making Fridays (remember Casual Fridays?) as the cool-down.

Put it in Practice

To practice energy management in the workplace, you need to:

1) Know when you’re at your highest and lowest energy levels and for what tasks.

2) Think of energy across multiple domains, mental, physical, and even emotional.

3) Understand the degree to which certain tasks drain or replenish you, and how long that recovery takes. For example, do you need 30 minutes to recover from some internal meetings or only 10?

4) Now, to the degree you have control over your workdays, how can you restructure what you do based on what you’ve discovered so that you have the stamina to get through the week and not crash on the weeks?

Managers, you can play a role by helping your employees understand the practice of energy management. Now, you might be thinking that task isn’t your job. And 10 years ago, that might have been true. No manager taught me this. I figured it out for myself, but it took decades and I would have been a much better employee a lot earlier had someone helped me discover this sooner.

If you want your people to show up in full, every day, you do have to take on more of a coaching role in the contemporary workplace. That includes helping them understand the concepts of energy management and having a conversation about expectations and the degree to which they have the autonomy to structure their workdays around their energy styles.

TLDR Summary

When it comes down to it, Bare Minimum Monday is another term for energy management and self-management. It means understanding how you work best and creating routines that support your work style so you get done what you need to get done. It’s not about slacking off, at least not as originally conceived.

Energy management in your career is absolutely critical so that you last long enough to have a career. When I mentioned this trending term and my thoughts on it to my dad, he told me about the advice he got early in his working life from the boss of a Summer Job. The boss told him that he needed to “maintain an even strain.” Then, when you really need to push for something real, you can.

Put another way, your overall career is a marathon, not a sprint. Some days (or miles) may involve sprinting but you can’t do it every day and survive the entire race.

References

HR Morning: https://www.hrmorning.com/articles/bare-minimum-mondays/

Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/i-do-bare-minimum-mondays-at-work-curb-burnout-stress-2023-2

HRWorks: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hr-works-the-podcast-for-human-resources/id1082671352?i=1000608984811

Read more tips on Energy Management here: https://www.rachboehm.com/search?q=energy