Executive coach Shane Arthur tells Business Insider that clients should protect Sunday for actual rest and avoid stacking Monday mornings with back-to-back meetings. His recommendation: start the week with a calm startup routine instead of borrowing weekend hours to catch up on work.
White-collar work has colonized the boundaries between job and life. Sunday-night prep feels disciplined. Often it's just unpaid spillover from roles and management cultures that can't fit their actual demands into the workweek they advertise. When an executive coach has to tell professionals to stop working on Sunday, the problem isn't time management. It's structural.
Media love these personal-productivity stories because they make a structural problem feel solvable with a better calendar block and a nicer notebook. Arthur's advice is solid. But here's what matters: if your role requires sacrificing Sunday to survive Monday, your workflow is broken, your boss is externalizing the cost, or both. Protecting Monday morning isn't laziness. It's a small act of refusing to let work annex the weekend.
Filed to the Media desk · Aug 23