STOP scheduling meetings on Mondays. ✋

I don’t mean you shouldn’t meet with colleagues at all on a Monday. 

I mean get rid of the regularly scheduled Monday meetings. 

I’ll explain here why your life, and those of your team, will be better without the regular Monday team meeting, leadership meeting, start of the week huddle, or whatever else you want to call it.

1. You are stealing productivity from your team. It’s the start of the week and your team is rested and ready to be productive, to get into work and make a difference. What you want is for them to reach their flow state and start pumping out results. But instead you make them sit in a meeting. 

2. You are stealing Sunday from your team. Instead of relaxing on Sunday and looking forward to the work week ahead (the actual work… the reason they joined… not the meetings), your team has the Monday meeting at the back of their mind. It steals their relaxation, their motivation, and reason for wanting to come to work.

3. You are stealing time from your employee’s lives. Maybe from Sunday (again) or from early Monday morning. How so? Do you expect your team to attend meetings unprepared? Are you going to put them on the spot and ask for data that could only come from analysis or other work before the meeting? And you scheduled the meeting for 9am, so when exactly do you think this work will take place?

If you need to get people up to speed at the start of the week, why not just share your expectations during the previous week? If things changed over the weekend (which is possible), send an email with your new expectations. If your expectations can’t be communicated by email and a Monday meeting is absolutely necessary, then use them sparingly. 

Otherwise, move the regular Monday meeting to Tuesday. Everyone will benefit.

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On the other hand, you could look into whether the meeting should just be removed entirely. Many meetings fail to add any value and if judged dispassionately, you’d be surprised how many meetings you’re wasting your time in. Check out this interview with the writer of “Kill Bad Meetings” ​Kevan Hall​ for more details.