The Monday Wall

Lately I seem to be finding Monday's at work challenging. I think that, psychologically, I am seeing it as a wall that I crash into. Once I've gotten past the initial crash, I generally do okay - but that initial crash can be tough. I'd like to figure out a way to avoid the Monday morning crash. Sitting here in the near dark listening to the ticking of the clock the one insight I seem to have is that I am crashing into my own expectations.

I want to get a good start on the week on Monday morning. Recharged from the weekend, I want to dive into my tasks and make some headway with them, but it seems that I inevitably run into something that I do not want to do that I feel compelled to do, some incident or accident that I feel I have to respond to, that I feel I have to set aside my plan and react to some other event. That frustrates me.

There were two separate incidents today that made up the Monday morning wall. First, one of my analysts escalated a case of tangled records and after multiple attempts of explaining it to me, we had to sit down in a meeting and look at the actual records to determine how they were tangled and how best to untangle them. Second, just as I was joining one of my meetings one of my analysts interrupted with a complex question that I did not have an answer for. When I asked them to document the issue and send me an email, they decided to try and resolve the issue themselves, but only managed to make it more tangled. (And that one is still waiting for me to attempt to untangle tomorrow.)

I know that a lot of the source of my stress is the feeling of not having control over my day, and unfortunately there is quite a bit of truth in that. I do wish I had more control over my day as I am often dogged by the feeling that I am wasting a lot of productive time. I realize that is a driver that is rising out of me, from deep inside, but it is a real driver none-the-less. I hate wasting time at work - there is plenty of work as it is and every hour of wasted time is an hour we cannot get back and an hour that could have been spent far more productively.

The time spent trying to get over the Monday morning wall could definitely be better spent elsewhere. I don't have an answer tonight, but at least I have an awareness and with an awareness perhaps I can find an answer later.