Anyone who works a nine-to-five job knows about Mondays and how the thought of them creeps into your mind on a Sunday night.

Just the dread of starting another week of monotony brings your whole mood down, but it’s not exclusive to office life. Experiencing it when working on your art also happens.

I’ve been there. When burnout hits, the thought of sitting at my writing desk gives me the same anxiety as the night before a new working week.

It was silly because any writing day is an escape from the daily grind, at least they’re supposed to be. At some point, however, when you go from casually writing on a weekend to seriously pursuing your publishing dreams, it morphs into a “job.”

That job then turns your first writing day of the week into a Monday, especially the kind of Monday that involves more authoring tasks than writing itself.

Curing a Case of the Authoring Mondays

In my situation, that dreaded Monday feeling stemmed from knowing that what I’d be doing the first writing session of a new week wasn’t working on my current WIP, but everything else a modern writer has to do to be a modern writer.

It was coming up with and creating social media posts for the week ahead, working on blogging content, and designing graphics for marketing.

Some months, I have blogs drafted and ready to be edited and polished, or weeks’ worth of graphics ready to post. Other weeks, I’d have no content or clue what to post. Those are the Mondays that are the Mondayest of Mondays, and a definite source of Sunday night anxiety.

Such worries about upcoming authoring tasks, and grappling with the guilt of doing them over progress on any latest WIP, started making the first writing session/day of my week something I dreaded rather than looked forward to, and I knew that meant I needed to change things up.

Create a Planning and Catch-All Day

I know that I’m more productive with a plan, and I love planning things, so by taking my Monday from a try-to-do-everything-day to a plan-the-rest-of-my-week-day, I now look forward to it because it’s all about organizing the week ahead, doing the parts of authoring that I like, and there’s no pressure.

I find that keeping on top of these things also sets me up for the rest of the week. I know what I’m doing on the other early mornings when I sit at my desk instead of wasting precious time trying to remember what I wanted to work on or what kind of posts I need to add to social media that day. Working these things out in advance also gives me a ready-to-go to-do list for the rest of the week!

With this planning day, I also give myself permission not to worry about those things any day other than on a Monday.

On a Monday, I can take my time to decide and capture social media photos, write any captions, schedule posts, and work out that I can write a new chapter on a Wednesday, or that this week getting the notes and timeline of my new WIP is the priority.

After that planning, any time left then becomes a catch-all day, and that catch-all is…

Reading the blogs I follow.Commenting on blogs/social media posts.Replying to comments left on my blog/social media.Clearing my inbox and notifications (which currently involves marking those ridiculous AI-written “Marketing” posts that are clogging up every writer’s inbox and DMs as Spam).

While I do little bits of these catch-all tasks throughout the week, if I’m prioritizing writing or have other responsibilities going on and can’t do these tasks daily, having time during my planning day to stay on top of these authoring tasks helps.

So, if you can, give yourself a planning day or session to get on top of everything at the start of your writing week (whatever day that may be) and see if it helps you avoid the pressure of a dreaded Authoring Monday.

Take Back Your Downtime

When you’re spending as much of your free time writing as you can, and dealing with other responsibilities like a day job and/or taking care of kids, that means squeezing authoring in at other times. Often, that leaks into what used to be your downtime, and contributes to that flat Authoring Monday feel.

Suddenly, at-home Saturday movie nights are packed with scrolling your screen as you keep up with your notifications, and you don’t even know what happened in the movie you just spent 2 hours “watching.”

Replying to comments and emails now also overtakes the real-life conversations going on around you, and that time to relax, read for pleasure, or remember to call a friend has been eaten by the time-suck of reposting your weekly content on Threads.

It’s very damned if you do and damned if you don’t, but to throw in another cliche, you can’t pour from an empty cup.

You need to take back your downtime, or at least some of it, to get to a place where it doesn’t feel like authoring is all that you do.

One thing I learned when I took a month off at the end of last year was that the world doesn’t stop if you don’t check social media, and it doesn’t really care either. If you can be away for a month, you can be away for 2 days over the weekend.

Missing out on your Facebook memories for a Saturday and Sunday won’t kill you, and neither will replying to that comment as part of your Monday catch-all day instead of during the days when you should be able to recharge your creativity.

If possible, keep your authoring to weekdays and reclaim weekend time for yourself. If you can’t, at least put a limit on it and only check social media/messages/emails/notifications once instead of multiple times. It’ll be worth it to avoid burnout and a bigger case of the Authoring Mondays.

Turn off Your Computer

My final tip for making Authoring Mondays more palatable is something I also started doing this year. I work from a laptop in a home office, and I usually leave that laptop on. During the week, it makes sense because the first thing I do on a weekday morning is get up at 6 a.m. to write with author friends on Threads.

With my computer left on, it’s easy to wake it up after I’ve woken up and get straight into my writing and authoring tasks, but that habit also started extending to the weekend.

Even though I now rarely write on a weekend thanks to the lessons learned during past burnout experiences, I would still leave the computer on to go into sleep mode so it was ready to go on Monday. Now, that’s probably not great for the battery, but it’s also not great for signaling to your writing brain that it’s time to turn off.

By not going through the ritual of turning off my computer, I was missing out on a finality to my creative week, and if you’re in the same boat, give it a try. It could be all you need to help your mindset and release any unconscious pressure, giving you that last step for curing any case of the Authoring Mondays.

— K.M. Allan

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