You’ve heard of “quiet quitting” — now get ready for “bare minimum Mondays.”
It’s the latest corporate trend taking over TikTok, coined by Marisa Jo Mayes after experiencing all-too-familiar burnout in the workplace.
The hashtag #bareminimummondays has already racked up 2 million views on the platform, with videos of users taking part in the seemingly effortless trend.
When Mayes, 29, grew frustrated with her corporate job, she turned to self-employment but realized the problem she still faced: She was a self-dubbed perfectionist.
“I would wake up on Monday, really burned out, really unproductive,” Mayes, who boasts more than 154,000 followers on TikTok, told The Post. “And because I was so unhappy with how unproductive I was being, I would make myself out a long list of things to do.”
By the end of the day, she was so overwhelmed by the self-inflicted pressure, she “felt like s–t” because she could barely complete her tasks. She dreaded Monday so much that her weekly “Sunday scaries” would paralyze her – and her work ethic.
“Every Sunday night, I would stay up really late, knowing that Monday would come faster the sooner that I went to bed,” said the Phoenix, Arizona-based creator. “Then I would sleep in as late as I possibly could on Monday, knowing that the second I wake up, the second stress comes back and the second my long to-do list would come back.”
Cue: Bare minimum Mondays, a “burnout prevention strategy” where employees scrape by doing the least amount of work possible to get through the most dreaded day of the week.
“It’s more of an opportunity for people to start untethering themselves from hustle culture, little by little, until corporate America catches up,” she said. “The tide is turning, and I feel like employees are tired of trading their well-being to perform well at work.”
The day Mayes decided to lower her self-set expectations, the more productive she was while working, she claimed – the seemingly insurmountable summit of tasks became more feasible when narrowed down to just a few. Now, she said it’s changed her life.
“It has completely overhauled my relationship to productivity and work and how I think about myself,” she added.
Gen Z-led movements such as the Great Resignation and acting your wage stem from young workers annoyed with being overworked, underpaid and, most importantly, unhappy. In fact, earlier this year, workers took the “quiet” part to new heights – quitting on a dime without a two-week notice.
But bare minimum Mondays are another rendition in the same vein: Young employees are focusing on their autonomy.
“I think for so many years, people’s vocation ran their life instead of the other way around, and so I think people really like the idea of taking control of their schedule and their workload,” 21-year-old Avery Morris, a senior influencer marketing manager, told The Post, adding that Gen Z is “taking back” their work-life balance.
In fact, the Atlanta-based TikToker, who is “prone to the Sunday scaries and burnout,” celebrates the trend. Bare minimum Mondays, she told The Post, “relieve” the anxiety she endures as the week begins, reveling in her “slow morning” instead of “jumping straight into the stressful tasks.”
In a viral clip, Morris weighed which work trend she prefers: “bare minimum Mondays” or “be done at 2 p.m. Fridays.” But her joyous video elicited some negative feedback.
“Y’all are seriously gonna get us all sent back to an office,” chided one user, while another snarked, “These same people wonder why management is making them come back.”
One person even made a jab at everyone who was boasting about their low effort online, claiming the antics would “ruin it for everyone.”
But fellow burned-out TikTokers also revered the newfound trend, which allowed them to remove some self-inflicted pressure. Mayes believes it might be because there are people “stuck in jobs where going above and beyond is the bare minimum.”
“I absolutely love this concept because I feel like I put so much pressure on myself every Monday to achieve so many different things — and then inevitably I burn out, and then the rest of the week I’m feeling kind of exhausted,” actor and model Angiela Naris said in a TikTok clip.
Another user, who goes by Celeste, hailed the productivity hack as the key to her efficiency, saying it’s made her “prioritize my time effectively.”
It’s not “cheating,” she gushed, because she’s “exceeding” her boss’ expectations.
But the positive reception online hasn’t made Mayes immune to criticism from corporate honchos. She claimed she receives frantic messages from professionals who are “up in arms” about the productivity hack, asking what they’re supposed to report to their bosses.
“If corporations are emailing me being like, ‘What the hell are you doing? Our employees are all doing this!’ — well, then, take a look in the mirror,” she said.
“It seems like the more we start prioritizing our well-being and treating ourselves like actual humans, the more corporate has an issue with that,” Mayes mused.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
