Imagine a Monday morning unlike any other. It’s a better Monday; one where you don’t get to the office after huffing exhaust fumes during your commute, or having a perfume induced allergy attack after being forcibly snuggled up next to a 55–year-old administrative assistant on the train and have to run to your first meeting. A meeting where you aren’t prepared because no one remembers what the heck they did the previous week until right around lunchtime.  A Monday morning where you can actually get caught up on your email, maybe call a client, and focus on that project you’ve been avoiding because it actually requires concentration.  Wouldn’t that be a better way to start the week?  If you have to be at the office between 40-80 hours a week, you might as well get something accomplished.

I call my humble proposal No Meeting Mondays.  The internet has brought such joys as Caturday, Sundog, and a myriad of Tumblr related memes for our daily enjoyment but it has also brought us much more insidious words and phrases like webinar and email bankruptcy and weekly status meetings.  Now it’s time for the internet to rise up, get off the couch, step over the discarded bags of Cheetos and half-empty cans of Mountain Dew, pull back the curtain, open the window and shout to the heavens, “PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME HAVE ONE DAY WHERE I CAN GET WORK DONE WITHOUT DISTRACTIONS!”  And then wheeze, because that’s a lot of exercise.

On average, I spend 12 hours a week in meetings, preparing for meetings, avoiding action items in meetings, giving presentations, and suffering through 1990’s clipart infused, bullet-point-riddled, 10-point Times-New-Roman fonted, PowerPoint slide decks.  That’s roughly 576 hours a year or 25,344 hours of my life spent in meetings—if I’m lucky enough to retire at 65.  That’s 2.89 years of my life spent furtively looking at a clock to see how long until the meeting is over.  Now you could quibble with my math, but the reality is we spend a lot of damn time in meetings and we need a day off from them.

Now I don’t suspect that No Meetings Monday would curb the actual amount of time I spend on meetings.  I’d still have to attend meetings to explain why a project isn’t moving forward because I haven’t had time to work on it because I’m always in meetings explaining why it hasn’t been done because I’m in meetings all the time.

No Meeting Mondays might just cure that.

It could also help those people who practice sales prevention by scheduling tons of meetings, so they can keep from actually managing their inbound communications.  Just think about that guy emailing you with an update about something you answered for him a week earlier.  You could easily say, “Hey Asshole, Didn’t you read that on Monday, when you didn’t have any meetings?” It’s a Nirvana we can only dream up while slogging through the purgatory of another marketing concall.

Of course, No Meeting Mondays is a pipe dream.  We aren’t going to Occupy Outlook any time soon.  Instead, we’ll allow our life to be managed by information processed by an Exchange Server making it easier for robots to take over the world in 2018.  It’s probably the biggest design backdoor flaw since Luke took down the Deathstar.  I’ve enjoyed my rare meeting free Monday, and hope that some of you will experience the same level of productivity some day soon.  Tell your boss, significant other, cat, anyone or anything with an active heartbeat (actually even the heartbeat is negotiable), no more meetings on Monday.  We have better stuff to do.  Let’s push ‘em off to Tie Tuesday because I look so much nicer anyway.

Now I have to cut this short, because I have to enter all my upcoming activities into my iPhone’s calendar so my wife knows what I’m doing.

#NoMeetingMondays