[1] January starts around the 10
th of the month. February is shorter and boring. Unless you go skiing, which half of the office does. March is promising at first, but too close to Easter to think seriously. April is either pre Easter, Easter or post Easter, so no good to start anything. May is too close to the summer break. June has more people than predicted on holidays, a pain. July and August, forget it, no full house on anything. September properly starts mid way. Holidays are really tiring. October is budget, no other life. But lots of conferences, so no real time. November is performance management and budget approvals. Too exciting. December has the most challenging of tasks: to decide on Christmas parties. December is not a proper month, it’s a simple excuse and long prelude to New Year’s Eve.
[2] On top of the above calendar of wholly unsuitable months, if you are in Spain you get extra 44 days of no work, fully paid, on top of Saturdays and Sundays, that is. About 30 in Germany or Ireland, 27 in Switzerland and 28 in the UK. France 36, although it always feels like 56. (In the US the concept does not exist, no statutory duty, employers can do whatever they want)
[3] And the week. Ah the week! If you think about it, Mondays are just the thing before Tuesdays, not an entity on their own, but they shape what happens on Tuesdays since there has been a full day to prepare. I am never sure about Wednesdays since they look dangerously similar to Tuesdays. Besides they are treacherously in the middle so we can’t get a proper three days together on anything. You might as well skip them and get into Thursdays which are the only serious days of the week. Fridays have a named restaurant chain (Thanks God It’s Friday, TGIF) as a form of gratitude to heavens for the end of the previous torture. Friday is a shorter day anyway, and you must wear casual, so it’s not the real thing. Saturdays and Sundays only exist because their religious connotations that could not fit in during the very busy week. And football.
[4] In summary, there is simply no time to do anything, so I do to know why people complain that things are not done. The miracle is that some things are done. Let Microsoft Outlook be injected by Artificial Intelligence to see if we can fix all this. I mean, to work even less, because most people are tired and, according to Gallup, disengaged. What Gallup does not seem to grasp is that employee engagement is low because we don’t have time to engage.
PS: I know somebody ( so a true story) who works as a tour guide in Ireland, who makes a case to convince American tourists (that is, the tourists) that they don’t have Wednesdays in the country. They simple skip Wednesdays and go straight from Tuesdays to Thursdays, to make a nice, shorter, manageable week. At the first incredulous look, he says, not to worry, they have an extra month so they can catch up. It’s called Febrensdury, just after February. So it’s all good. It started as a joke, perhaps to get attention, but he is always taken aback by the number of tourists who challenge him: ‘Hold on! Wait a minute! That’s not good. If you do that, you still loose days’, whilst reaching for the calculator in the smartphone and start computing, sometimes as a couple. ‘You see, the numbers don’t tally, man!’
PS2. Time is only in your mind. Not a real thing. We are in a Matrix, anyway. Don’t fight it.