Don't Panic. It's Just Monday.

Productivity, reimagined.

Every Monday afternoon, like clockwork, I have an existential crisis.

By Tuesday, I’ve recovered. I usually find my way back to my computer to take care of the small avalanche of admin stuff that is my least favorite thing to tackle, but is essential to keep my businesses running and humming.

By Wednesday, I’m in the field. (The literal field.) I’m wandering. I’m writing first drafts in my mind. I trust, again, in my own innate understanding of productivity.

Most weeks, I forget that this cycle plays out. It’s a little self-awareness amnesia that — if I didn’t have the mirror of my husband & business partner Sam to non-dramatically point this pattern out to me — I’d never know it was repeating.

I remember when I was practicing corporate law in DC, I would experience deep, deep, deep Sunday evening dread.

Even though, on any given weekend, I would have likely spent some of it in the office, and I had *very* little personal life to write poetry about, there was some special impending inner doom that I felt on Sunday nights.

I know it wasn’t just the lawyers (despite us lawyers thinking that we are the single-most busy, swamped, stressed-out people on the planet). No. This particular flavor of dread is widely well-known.

It even has a name — the “Sunday scaries.”

If you’ve felt the Sunday stuff, you know it too.

I can look back now on my Big Law days and realize that the pit-of-my-stomach feeling was an embodied truth — my own body trying to clue me in, like a canary in a coal mine: you were not born to live this squeezed and stressed a life.

Back then, I knew as soon as Monday at 6 or 7am rolled around, the red blinking light on my Blackberry (!) would send a silent (yet LOUD) message: Your time is not your own. The pace will be unimaginably fast. There will be very little discernment between urgent and important and poor senior management of timelines. Emails will fly your way — like countless pings to your nervous system. You will spend the next 5 days straight (and you won’t really get a break next weekend) strung out in fight or flight.

In that world, there was a very specific version of productivity — and it’s not just in Big Law, it’s everywhere.

You get shit done. You crush goals. You move the ball forward. You hard work your way through billable hours, through days, through whole decades of your life — you hard work. At the very least, your aim is cross off your to do list and zero out your inbox. Everyday. Repeat. Forever. It’s very linear. It’s very task-oriented.

And it’s also very binary. You can point to something at the end and say “here, I did this.” Or not — I failed to be productive.

Heck, in this version, you can even measure it with numbers. You can track it with an app. And put the metrics in a spreadsheet.

Trust me, I get it.

There’s a time and a place for this approach. To be sure.

SMART goal, KPI, OKR, RPF, EOD, API, COB, YTD, CPU, ROA, ROE, ROI, LOL, etc. etc. etc.

I finally realized — at some point in my lawyering days — it didn’t feel like *this* approach held the wholeness of my effort, my work, my success, my value, my growth, my fulfillment. Not my kinda productivity.

It’s *an* approach. It’s not the only approach.

But since it’s everywhere in our cultural conversations around work, it’s the one that sticks.

It’s also the cause of my current Monday existential crises.

Here I am, minding my own business.

For the record, I’ve spent 10 years now, since leaving Big Law, opting out —intentionally & attention-ally — from the norms, the values, and the habits of “Stress Culture,” where the characteristics of fight / flight / freeze have been normalized into badges of honor (fight becomes busyness, flight becomes rushing, freeze becomes numbing out at the EOD).

And yet — this stuff runs deep. It’s sticky as hell. And it not only seeps its way into my Mondays, I’m still actively working through it.

It’s like after having my first kid. I had just done the *literally* most productive thing I could do with my body and I was like, “I feel bad about my inbox.”

I find that when my clients are other entrepreneurs / small business owners / independent consultants / coaches / creatives who’ve also jumped ship from corporate and are looking to redefine the pace of their days, the rhythm of their weeks, and their definition of success — they mostly come to me still stuck with the old scripts too.

They’ve quit the 9-5 / never-ending grind, and yet… the grooves cut so deep, they’re still swimming in Stress Culture, even now. Jamming their schedules, hustling their pace, exhausted at the end of each day.

It’s why this kind of work is a daily practice.

So on Monday mornings, I do my morning family thing.

There’s the circus of kids and lunches to make and a LOT of coffee. The boys leave the house with their dad for school and for work.

And it is SILENT.

I am alone.

It is calm. And quiet. For the first time since the previous Friday morning.

I write my Morning Pages with leisurely space. I set my timer, I meditate. I tidy the ZOO that is my kitchen. I make a breakfast. I read things I love. I putter. I tidy some more. I putter again. I catch enough silence and space and sunlight and fresh air to get my creative juices flowing again. Or at least remember my own name. I might take a walk. Read or write a few pages. I go to the studio — I teach my lunchtime meditation and yoga classes. I’m good. I’m groovy. “Stress Culture, who?” I’m content. I’m present. And I’m actually doing the work I came here to do.

And then. Some crumb. Some kernel. Some speck of lint on this alternative view of a Monday I have carefully crafted.

Maybe I remember that inbox I feel bad about. I go on social media and see a post about crushing it or an algorithm that promises the ANSWER. This VERY specific definition of productivity.

Cue: the Monday afternoon existential crisis.

“IS WHAT I’M DOING ENOUGH?! AM I MOVING FAST ENOUGH! WHAT ABOUT ALL THE KPIs I’m Not Performing?!”

This — this is why I chose Monday morning for the publication of this Substack.

It’s a purely selfish NOTE TO SELF.

JKLOL, it’s an invitation to you too, to all of us.

To pause.

To consider.

Is the default definition of what Mondays mean really what they mean to you?

I don’t know. Only you know.

I’m learning. And re-learning.

Which is why I can usually hammer out some computer-y stuff on Tuesday. And by Wednesday, I’m back to what productivity might mean for a living, breathing, organic thing. Like a human. Like me.

Also like the hydrangea bush I just pruned back this week. For the hydrangea, there needs to be space for new growth, new blooms to emerge. For me too, there needs to be SPACE for things to emerge — ideas, pieces of writing, aliveness in my teaching & coaching, even just imagination and playfulness to my days for the sheer sense of simply BEING here.

I doubt, admittedly, that this approach will get me ahead.

But if it allows me TO BE WHERE I AM, then that— that I’ll take it.

I want to hear from you — Mondays? Productivity? What resonates? What provokes? What do you KNOW that you might yet not be living? What existential crises may you too be having today?

Sending so much LOVE your way.

Let’s Sit Together,

Xo Cath