Hate Mondays? Here’s how to free yourself from a work funk

The “Monday blues” is a sadly familiar feeling. Another long week of work ahead, you tell yourself, as you somehow drag yourself out of bed and attempt to feign enthusiasm to face the morning.

We’ve all been there. Those times in our career when every hour feels like quicksand, and you spend more time watching the clock on the wall than working, silently willing for it to tick over to 5pm so you can check out. Until the next day, that is.

If you have ever felt like that, or currently do, then you are certainly not alone. One of the most disturbing work trends over the last few years has been the low level of engagement that too many people have with their employment.

Every year, Gallup researches 1000 people in 160 different countries on how they feel about their jobs. The latest 2024 State of the Global Workplace report shows that just 23 per cent of people said they were engaged at work.

That means that over three-quarters of people said they were either “quiet quitting” (filling a seat and watching the clock) or “loud quitting” (directly harming the organisation). No matter which way you cut it, that’s a lot of disengaged workers who feel like they’re in a rut they don’t know how to get out of.

If you’re feeling a bit “blah” about your job, there are actually four things you can do right now to help pull yourself out of it.

The first thing is to admit that you’re in a funk. It’s only too easy to glide through life unconsciously without being honest with ourselves, so take some time to notice how you’re feeling about work right now and if you need some help.

For me, I always feel it in my gut before anywhere else. I first noticed this during one of my first full-time jobs in an advertising agency when I was in my early 20s. I wasn’t always in tune with my emotions back then, but it slowly dawned on me that I was no longer getting the same level of excitement, enthusiasm or knowledge from work that I used to.

It all came into focus one sunny morning as I caught the ferry on Sydney Harbour to my city office. The closer I got there, the tighter a knot in my stomach became, until I was almost violently sick walking into work.

I didn’t fully understand, but this was my body’s way of telling me that the disengagement I felt had gotten too much. I walked straight into my boss’s office and quit on the spot.

The next time you feel that familiar dread starting to creep in, put some of this advice into practice.

Now, obviously, this is not the right solution for everyone, but for me, it was a wake-up call to acknowledge the gaping disconnect between what I wanted from my job and how I was actually feeling about it.

The second way of escaping a funk is to identify which parts of your job you most enjoy and which you dislike, then try to lean in or out of those areas respectively. This is called “job crafting”, and it is now a very well-researched area of science that can help you find more meaning at work.

Just by sharing your preferences with a colleague, mentor, manager or friend, you can help workshop some possible solutions together.

The third thing you can do is clarify your goals so you know exactly what you are working for. Sometimes a funk can be caused by a lack of understanding of what you’re meant to doing, so by defining your aims with yourself or the people around you, you can know if you’re heading in the right direction or not.

The final way to spin yourself out of a rut is to do something – anything – to break the cycle of repetitiveness. By injecting fresh energy into new projects at work or even outside of it, you can find small pieces of new motivation that can help you see things in a fresh light.

No one enjoys waking up on Monday morning and praying the week is already over. So the next time you feel that familiar dread starting to creep in put some of this advice into practice and tell those negative thoughts exactly how to funk off.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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