This is an I-Heart podcast.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the new corner office, the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the new world of work, or location and hours are more flexible than in the past.

Today's tip is that Mondays go much better when you plan your week, or at least your Monday,

before Monday. You want to start your Mondays ready to go instead of wasting your starting

energy, deciding what to do.

Now, I know that a lot of people and a lot of organizations start Monday mornings planning

the week ahead. You sit down as a team and set your goals or get your marching orders,

and it makes sense. Monday is, technically, the start of the work week. But energy is a funny thing. When we spend

Monday morning deciding what to do, we often can't start executing until Monday afternoon.

And by afternoon, many people are starting to fade. Now, this might be worth it if there was no other good time to plan,

which might seem to be the case. I mean, you're not going to call a team meeting on Sunday

afternoon to plan Monday morning. But why not look back a little further? For the past few years,

I've planned my weeks on Fridays. Friday afternoon tends to be a great time to plan the week ahead,

partly because most people aren't doing anything else of consequence on Friday afternoons.

Unlike Monday morning, there's not much of an opportunity cost.

So, by sitting down with your calendar and listing priorities and figuring out where they can go,

you can turn what might be wasted time into some of your most productive moments of the week.

Another upside of planning on Fridays?

Well, one of the reasons that Mondays and Sunday nights, for that matter, can be rough

is that we don't know what's waiting for us on Monday morning.

We know there's a lot of work, but we don't know exactly what and what we're going to do about it.

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