Shane Arthur, an executive coach in Raleigh, North Carolina, advises clients to avoid working on Sundays — and to start their workweeks by avoiding meetings on Monday mornings. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I believe in startup and shutdown routines for your week. On Monday mornings, I get my coffee, my journal, and my laptop. I take it slow and build my way into my week. It takes two to three hours.
Working on Sundays is something I’ve seen people talking about on LinkedIn, as in, “This is how to make your week work.” The idea is that if you crush the prep on Sunday night, the week goes so well.
Don’t do that. Many of my clients are business owners, CEOs, and executives who are consistently working too much.
I own my business, so I have the freedom to book the hours I want. I find that when I wake up on a Monday morning, get the kids fed, and my wife or I drop them off at school, I need to recharge a little bit. To jump into client calls at 9 o’clock in the morning is tough.
I’ll do that on other days of the week, but Monday mornings are a protected space for me. I coach my clients to do the same thing if they have the freedom to do so. I tell my clients to help their teams think about this, too, so that it can trickle down a bit.
Even if you’re not the boss, I think employees have a bit more freedom than they sometimes take. I understand that there are rules you have to follow, but at least the first hour of every Monday and the last hour of every Friday is key.
The trick is not having meetings. As long as nobody is demanding your time in that window, you get to choose how you use it. That is where the magic is.
I used to try to do everything between calls
On Fridays, I try not to take late afternoon calls. If the weather’s nice, I’ll walk in the woods. I’m looking back at my week, going through each day and remembering: Are there any to-dos? I’m looking ahead to next week. Are there any things that need to be prepped for? Anything to confirm? I think of it as general housekeeping.
I have to not fill the day because if I’m on a call as I’m walking in the house at 5 o’clock on Friday, I’m pretty distracted for that first hour. It’s still on my mind. My energy is still in that place.
I used to try to do everything in the two minutes between calls. I don’t anymore. I wait until the end of the day or the end of the week to catch up on all that stuff.
When I’m coaching, I tell people to identify the most important things for the day and do those first. Some clients get so into calls and being available that they finish the day, and the important things aren’t done. Then they go home and do them at night. I’m not interested in working like that or helping other people work like that.
If you’re working a 40- or 45-hour week, if you can just hold on to the first hour and last hour, your whole experience is different. I think you will end up being more productive, but that’s not my goal. My goal is to make it all flow more smoothly. A well-organized, structured 35-hour workweek beats a rushed, 45-hour workweek every time.
We’re always holding work and family in tension
There was a CEO I coached for a couple of years. I ran into him at a golf tournament and met his wife. She gave me a bear hug and started talking about how much their family life had changed because of how he was showing up.
Most of my clients are always thinking about all the people they’re taking care of, the people they’re responsible for. We’re always holding work and family in tension. I’m not asking people to choose family 100% of the time.
The way we work has changed. It’s much easier to always be connected. We used to have offices and set work hours, and for many people, that’s no longer true. That connectivity has led people to reach out in ways that would have been inappropriate 30 years ago. In that era, unless a building was burning, it could wait till tomorrow.
Don’t get me wrong, I love work-life integration, but it’s got to be managed. We’ve got to be aware of what we’re doing because we don’t have the guardrails we used to have.
These things matter because I think about regret. Our kids are 8 and 10. I look back and realize I’d love to play with my son again when he was 3, instead of being on that work trip that was good, but I didn’t have to do.
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