What's really behind our Sunday scaries?

How to avoid a year-round spooky season. 🎃

Happy Monday! I’m hopeful this email landed in your inbox after a restful weekend, with your mind entirely unaccompanied by thoughts of the upcoming workweek. So much so that when you read the title of this edition, you thought:

“What a foreign and faraway concept - I can’t at all relate to being anxious about work before I go back to work!”

But if at any point this weekend you felt: apprehensive, worried, or otherwise preoccupied with a sense of doom related to going back to work on Monday morning….

Then you are well acquainted with the Sunday scaries.

Sunday scaries can be bleh, or they can be brutal. They can be brief, or they can bully you the entire weekend.

Whatever flavour they come in for you, we can all agree: They suck.

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The Sunday scaries are fear. They usually show up on Sunday afternoons and evenings. They’re different for everyone, but my “Sunday scaries” seasons have been:

✅ When work things would change significantly over a weekend, leading a feeling of “not knowing what to walk into” on Monday morning

✅ When I had to be responsive to work queries on the weekend after working a normal work week

✅ Weeks where I didn’t feel prepared for the next one

✅ Feeling so exhausted by work that two days didn’t feel long enough to truly recover, do life admin, sleep in, etc.

Overall: scary.

If every Sunday feels like this - you’re not so much in a nice workplace as you are a spooky one. What now? 🎃

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It’s Sunday evening as I wrap up this newsletter. And unfortunately, it is spooky season for me. In a departure from my normal, the latter three of that list above are...closer to true than not true.

Which means yep, I have the scaries. I’m confident they’ll go away soon, but they’re here today, so I’ve had to make room.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the scaries, so it was a good exercise to remember and write down the practices I follow that *normally* leads to a weekend completely devoid of any work fears. I started these when I was working at a startup, and have continued them while running my company.

The three practices for fighting the Sunday scaries are: to know your enemies; to prioritise “intel”; and to prepare for Monday’s battle on Friday.

Practice one: Know your enemies.

We spend a lot of time trying to avoid feeling the fear - thinking, “This is my weekend, I shouldn’t let this bother me.” But if you sit in the feeling, what comes to mind? What do you visualise? What’s truly the problem? Is it the fear of an overflowing inbox from weekend warriors? Are you tired and therefore not feeling recharged for the week? Do you feel resentful from checking your inbox or working too much on the weekend? Do you have something you didn’t finish on Friday that will be late on Monday? Are you having a personal issue with someone at work and you’re not looking forward to round two? (Tip: Walk away from the lunch table.)

If you can start to untangle what is causing your fear, you can gather the data and make a plan to address it.

Mine today is: “To need to start so early.” Because I worked a lot of my weekend - company founder responsibilities - I am still tired, and I’m not happy with how long my to-do list already is. It feels like I’ve run a marathon, but have another marathon to run.

Practice two: Prioritise “intel.”

Data is helpful for making a plan based in reality. However, you will never ever have enough “intel.” Just like in international espionage (or so James Bond tells me), you have to gather as much information as is reasonable, and then work from it despite any ambiguities.

In other words: The scaries will never go away if you keep waiting for the answer to arrive, nor will the answer easily appear to you.

So when the scaries feeling shows up, sit in it. Start talking to yourself, or writing down, why you think you might be feeling this way. This brings your feelings to your prefrontal cortex, allowing your powerful analytical brain to take the reins and translate them for you.

For my version of Sunday scaries today, it is: “Monday is the day that, if it goes well, makes the whole week easy. But I’m worried about it going well because I’m already tired, which means I already feel behind.”

Practice three: Prepare for battle on Friday.

It’s possible that your scaries are just a “general fear of what’s coming on Monday.”

I venture that this fear might be true - especially if you have indeed forgotten something, or if you know that the situation you left your inbox in on Friday will only be the same, if not worse, on Monday.

You know those productivity gurus who say make a list before you go to bed? I 100% buy it, and take it a step further:

Before you close your laptop on Friday, make your plan for next week.

In whatever format works best for you, list out and then review:

1. Next week’s calls and meetings, and how much time of your 40-hour workweek they take up.

2. Next week’s personal time - when are you taking your lunch breaks/breaks, when are you starting work and when are you intending to leave?

3. Looking at this, how much time is left for “work” work?

4. What didn’t get finished this workweek (i.e., what’s shifting to Monday?)

5. What has to get done next week?

6. And, if time, a list of:

   1. Reminders to send

   2. Emails to respond to

   3. “Pings” and checkins

   4. And any other communications that, while important, take up a lot of time. I list these out and already assign them to certain days so I can go into my weekend confident I haven’t “forgotten something.”

I have Sunday scaries for a few reasons today, but this preparation isn’t one of them. I know exactly what I’m walking back into Monday and, in a normal season, I would have been able to close my laptop on Friday and not think a single ounce about work until Monday morning.

Being prepared also gives me the data to set boundaries if someone decides to show up in my inbox tomorrow with new requests. I know what is expected of me this week - and new additions can get in line.

This is the way through. If you have the Sunday scaries, you’re the only person who knows that you do, and you’re the only person with enough data at hand to figure out how to fix it in a way that best suits your life. 🎃

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I hope you don’t find this newsletter prescriptive, or preachy. It isn’t meant to be. No matter how prepared you are, having nicer workplaces, doing nicer work, all within a nicer work-life balance, is a moving target.

It’s hard to manage all the variables - especially since the variable forever out of our control is the rest of the world.

(I guess “the rest of the world” would be more than one variable, but it’s Sunday night, so I trust you get me).

If you’re feeling lately that the Sunday scaries are coming more often than normal, if work feels harder, if your boss seems stressed, if your company environment overall is tense - it’s not just you. The economic situation of the world is not good, and that trickles into our lives in manifold ways. Including, and especially, at work.

Which means there’s only so much planning and positivity you can throw at the Sunday scaries problem before recognising: it might just suck right now.

That’s where I am, and I’m not sitting here making myself feel guilty about it. Instead, I’m trying to:

Practice malicious positivity. Trust that competency over competition speaks volumes. And remember that my responsibility is to keep rowing in the same direction.

In closing: I am awed by any human who has never had the Sunday scaries.

But I am manifestly terrified and impressed by the awesomely powerful humans who have had a season, or seasons, of scaries. They’ve fought their way through their personal haunted mansions of work and economic monsters to come out the other side stronger and smarter - and just a little bit scary themselves, too.

Scary because they know their worth, and are armed to the teeth ready to fight for it.*

*Including for the right to not think about their workplace at all from closing Friday to opening Monday.

It’s you. No matter the season.

Kindly,

Rachel

Journal exercise for paid subscribers ✨

Hello Nice Work supporters! As promised - more journal exercises for you to practice and build on your own personal culture of nice work. This journal exercise is designed to give you a “battle report” of what’s leading to your Sunday scaries. Enjoy!