Lucky Man Planning

Over the past few years I've been working from home a fair bit.

And when you work from home, you can't help paying peripheral attention to the arrival of the post: when, how much, etc.

So soon I started to observe a minor phenomenon - there was less post delivered on a Tuesday than on any other delivery day.

In fact, on a good number of Tuesdays we received no post at all - which was rarely the case on other days.

Finally I decided to ask our friendly postie: am I imagining it, or do we get much less post on Tuesdays?

'Everyone gets less post on Tuesdays' came the reply.

'It's always been that way. I guess no-one does any work on Mondays...'

Now apparently here in the UK we have quite the productivity problem. Together we produce much less per hour than our fellow workers in countries such as Italy, France, Germany and US, and have done for quite some time.

And this stubborn underperformance represents such a barrier to accelerated economic growth (and resulting raised living standards) that the Chancellor is said to have recently described it as the 'challenge of our time.'

Given that, it's not surprising that all sorts of things are apparently being considered as potential solutions: reforming higher education, improving transport links and national infrastructure, devolving power to cities and regions, and so on.

And no doubt they are all of vital importance.

But they also all sound dauntingly big and complex to bring about. When you're setting out to change something like 'Skills', where exactly do you start?

So what if the government instead took the advice of Chip & Dan Heath in their best-selling book Switch (How to change things when change is hard) and sought to 'shrink the change'?

(That is, break the desired change into tangible, bite size pieces and then take them on one by one, rather than tackling the whole abstract thing in one go.)

What if they started by going all in on inspiring us to get more done on Mondays?

Undoubtedly the maths is very complicated, but surely a, say, 5% improvement in Total Monday Output (TMO) would make a big old dent in that overall productivity gap?

This wouldn't be achieved by the kinds of invitations to love Mondays, and so forth, so beloved of job sites: Monday, as we know, comes after Sunday, and Sunday is too powerful a competitor to take on. (See 'Manic Monday', The Bangles.)

But maybe some more subtle, and real world, nudges might make a difference?

For example, could a scientific study be produced and promoted proving that Mondays feel like they go much quicker if you get your head down?

Or could employers be incentivised to select and reward a Monday Employee of the Month, for the individual at their firm who's led the way in making Mondays as industrious and productive as midweek days?

Maybe we could even appoint a dedicated Ministry of Mondays, whose sole remit would be to devise and implement ideas to eke more output out of this most miserable of 24 hour spans?

So much to think about, but I'm done for now.

It's Monday morning and I haven't checked out what the internet thinks about the Jamie Vardy red card yet...