5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself Every Monday Morning

Last week, our fine friends out at the Yahoo offices in sunny Sunnyvale, California shared an article entitled “5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself Every Monday Morning.” Since you’re all a bunch of Einsteins, you can probably take a pretty good stab at what this article was all about. The author goes on to explain some of the psychology of the Monday blues and the nature of the questions themselves and blah, blah, science, yada, yada, whatever. Being the man of the people that I am, I thought I’d give it a whirl. The questions and my unbiased, honest answers are as follows:

1. Am I excited to dive into the challenges that I have lined up for the week?
This is a trick question when you don’t have any challenges lined up, right? Seriously, does doing just enough to not get fired count as a challenge? I’m not really like a “reinvent the wheel” type of guy. I’m more like a “fly under the radar and collect a paycheck so I can get the fuck out of here and hit up happy hour” type of guy. Maybe things will change when that CEO title comes a calling, but right now I have a better chance of starting at QB in the Super Bowl, so for the time being, I’m good. I’ll just keep doing my thug thing.

2. Am I looking forward to engaging with the people I am meeting or working with?
Define engaging for me? Do you mean engaging as in “interpersonal and digital interaction with other individuals in order to achieve a common goal?” Or do you mean engaging as in “o prepare for contact or conflict with an enemy?” If you meant the latter, then yes, I’d jump at the opportunity to engage in hand to hand combat, throwing haymakers left and right at some of my coworkers. However, I’m getting the vibe that you were hinting at the first option, in which case, no. I’d rather not have to endure eight hours of awkward elevator conversation, incessant foot tapping, and fake laughing at piss poor joke attempts.

3. Am I going to my dream job?
Well, if you want to get technical here, then yes. I did as a matter of fact, have a dream about my job last night. It went a little something like this:

No, I don’t work for Initech, and no, I didn’t steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from my company, but you get the gist. Fleeting images of nagging higher-ups and irritating coworkers fill my dreams far more than they should following a debaucherous weekend. Last night I had to take so much melatonin to stay asleep that I thought it was gonna kill me.

4. Am I being compensated fairly for the value I bring to my job?
This one is kind of a slippery slope. On one hand, I only do about one hour of real, actual work in any given day, so considering I have enough to keep the lights on and buy whole specialty pizzas at 3 o’clock in the morning, the pay isn’t too shabby. On the other hand, I’m FAR from what I would consider rich. Drake said, “Started from the bottom, now we here,” but in my case, it’s more like, started upper middle class, now I’m poor. So, to answer the question, am I getting paid enough, yes… no… fuck, I don’t know. Let’s just move on to the next question. This is giving me anxiety and my Xanex prescription ran out yesterday.

5. Do I feel energized, rested, and confident?
Let’s be serious, guys. I just always went under the assumption that there isn’t a person in America that goes into work on Monday morning energized, rested, and confident. But, if you must, then here we go. Last night, I stayed up until midnight to catch the end of that Sunday night game, because who doesn’t, right? In my defense, I tried to go to bed afterwards, but all I could do was toss and turn, feverishly pondering the $100 I just lost on my three game parlay and the litany of questionable decisions I made this weekend. As far as that confidence thing goes, I’ve been at my job for six months and I still don’t know half of the acronyms folks use or, hell, half of what my job even is in the first place. So, yea, I’m about as confident as the fat guy with his shirt on in the pool right now.

So there you have it. Looks like I didn’t do too hot. But hey, I’m a reasonable guy. I’m not just gonna poo-poo all over these questions without providing any reasonable alternatives. So instead, here are five more questions that I’ll probably ask myself at some point on Monday mornings. I invite you to do the same.

1. How many more times can I hit the snooze button?

2. If I slash all of my benefits and my 401k, how much more money am I going to see on my future paychecks? I looked over some old pay statements while I was bored and the amount of money taken to go towards things that I’ll likely never see is borderline criminal.

3. Is there an obscure sports league somewhere out there that I could go pro in? I’m a pretty decent athlete and I’m still in pretty good shape, so there has to be something out there that I could dominate in. Sure, playing handball in Bosnia-Herzegovina isn’t ideal, but it has to be better than slaving away in a cube for 8 hours a day, right?

4. Is my resume in order and up to date? I got a bad feeling that today might be “the day.”

5. And finally…