A Sunday Evening Ritual That Makes Monday Less Awful

Five tasks to stave off the Sunday Blues.

Kristin Wong
3 min readApr 30, 2021
Photo by Cristian Rojas from Pexels

Like wet socks and the word “moist,” Sunday evenings are notoriously unpleasant. Even if you work for yourself, you don’t work at all, or you have a job you like, Sunday evenings still seem to carry that last-day-of-vacation vibe. The end of the collective week is kind of a drag.

I once came across advice that argued you should do a small amount of work on Sundays. This way, Monday morning feels less shocking, less like jumping from a warm bed into a cold shower. I gave it a try and used Sundays to catch up on emails. Turns out, the advice was pretty solid. I found when I spent an hour or so working on Sunday, it made for a smoother transition into Monday. But I still hate the idea of working on Sunday, so I tweaked the advice a bit. Instead, I use Sunday to plan my week ahead. This routine involves five main tasks, and I’ve been using it every week for a year. It’s done a lot to stave off the Sunday evening blues, and maybe it will for you, too.

Schedule a time for writing. I’m happy when I’m writing. But with a week full of obligations — work meetings, dentist appointments, Zoom birthdays— it can be hard to squeeze in anything else. Rather than search for time to write as the week unfolds, I schedule writing time into my week before…

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Kristin Wong

Kristin Wong has written for the New York Times, The Cut, Catapult, The Atlantic and ELLE.