I hate Mondays. The theory is that if you hate Mondays you should change your job. And if you do that but find yourself hating your job again recently after joining a new company, well then it’s time for a new career. I got tripped up during a job interview when I was asked “What’s your perfect Monday look like?” Cue existential crisis. I challenge you to think about it deeply. Chances are your perfect Monday doesn’t look anything like how you currently spend it. Do Mondays have to be so bad?

I recently joined madewithlove and found that Mondays here aren’t like anything else. I’ve worked at 3-person startups and Fortune 15 titans of industry. Never have Mondays been so stress free. How do we do it?

As a PM, I only have two obligations on Monday: a PM sync meeting at 9am (30 minutes in length); and a team wide staff meeting at 2pm (15 minutes). For the first meeting, we use Notion to asynchronously write down updates on our projects, identify important documentation changes, and figure out who is taking time off for the next couple weeks. During the meeting, we spend time silently reading the updates that others wrote and then discuss any important topics. For the second meeting, we have an update from our CEO where he tells us important news along with a bad joke or two. This Zoom call is also recorded and a written version posted on our internal BlogIn site.

Of course, I also run a daily standup for my assigned projects. We’ve recently switched to goal based standups (detailed article coming soon) which create highly focused and very fast meetings. It takes fewer than 1 minute per person. For one project, we even do asynchronous written standups. This works great since we are a remote first company, and, for that particular team, half of our developers are in the Americas working about 5 hours behind. No meeting necessary.

So that’s my Monday, about 1 hour of obligation. The rest of the time is mine to focus on whatever I think is important. There are no fires to put out, no endless meetings, no dread of what the week ahead holds. In fact, most of our office cuts out around 3pm for an afternoon workout session. How many companies are stress-free enough to end work at that time on a Monday? Well, madewithlove is one and I wouldn’t trade my Mondays for any other day of the week, except maybe Friyay.