Monday, Friday Work Better on Weekends

Time is not created equal.

A minute is not always a minute.

Best examples?

Sitting in the dentist’s chair.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Watching certain people eat.

Next best example?

The workweek.

It runs Monday through Friday.

It seems to run longer than a root canal.

And what of the weekend?

In theory, it’s two days.

In reality, it’s 20 minutes.

Time is a changin’.

Where once we worked for pay, we now work for the weekend.

Credit cards have made money unimportant.

Downtime is the tender of the ‘90s.

What needs to be done is obvious:

Shorten the workweek. Lengthen the weekend.

This solution is not as radical as it sounds.

When workweek is defined as the time during which actual work is actually done, it does not consist of five days.

It consists of two days:

Tuesday and Thursday.

If one works for a large corporation, the government or an in-law, all interaction between nose and grindstone happens on these days.

In only the rarest of circumstances does anything approaching productivity take place on Monday, Wednesday or Friday.

Why?

Because Monday, Wednesday and Friday are dedicated to a pursuit most employees consider their top job priority:

Getting through the workweek.

Consider how the average workweek typically goes:

Monday:

Wrong numbers are entered, heavy objects are dropped on toes, surgeons take out the wrong kidneys.

Tuesday:

Extra-large coffees, black, 19 sugars.

Wednesday:

You do what you can to get over: Sick days. Short days. Lazy, hazy days.

Thursday:

The good news is you get a paycheck.

The bad news is it’s your paycheck.

Friday:

Very busy day: Weekend must be planned, happy-hour accommodations made.

So, how to reconfigure the workweek?

Simply cut it back to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with Wednesday maintaining its traditional function of Hump Day.

The weekend will then run Friday through Monday.

This will do many things:

It will balance the disproportionate hands of time.

It will rejuvenate a work force that often appears to have just been released from some alien mothership.

It will save a lot of kidneys.

Hey, it works for me.

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Jim Shea is a columnist at the Hartford Courant. To reach him, write to Jim Shea, Hartford Courant, 285 Broad St., Hartford, CT 06115.