'Bare Minimum Mondays' | A new wellbeing trend is on the rise, and it could become a crisis

Most will be acquainted with the pangs of anxiety felt at the end of a weekend, when all of the tasks for the coming week come flooding back into focus.

However, far from Mondays being a day of catching up and forging a path of productivity for the week ahead, a new trend, coined ‘Bare Minimum Mondays’ is being used among younger generations, who seemingly identify the first working day of the week as a write-off.

The new trend is at odds with prior perceptions of Friday as the day of the week in which productivity takes a dive, due to an impending weekend and exhaustion from the working week. Previous data from Hays found that only 16.7% of tasks are accomplished on a Friday, whilst Monday accounted for over 20% of our weekly output.

What’s changing the dynamic among younger workers?

The term was first coined by Marisa Jo, a TikToker, who describes it as a way for her to quell the work pressure and hold herself accountable to “completing the least amount of work necessary to get by that day.”