In the introduction to Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott‘s classic book about the writing life, Lamott writes:
Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all the freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.
I certainly am not one to question the wisdom of Anne Lamott and her writing advice. She is a New York Times best-selling author who has written over 50 books compared to my *checks notes* three. So the fact that she skips writing on Monday (and maybe even takes the entire month of December off) apparently hasn’t diminished her productivity.
But I have a different view of Mondays.
Mondays to me signify a fresh start, a new beginning, a blank page, and I time to make a new dent in whatever work in progress I’ve got going at the moment, or even starting a new writing project. True, some Mondays are more productive than others, but that goes for any day of the week.
By writing in my journal first — before getting into any real writing — I can prime the pump a bit and get my writing routine going.
I tend to have several writing projects going at once, and tend to follow the approach of Liz Moore, as she describes it in Jami Attenberg’s book 1000 Words:
I’m working on several writing projects at the moment, and I try to rotate them, so on Monday I’ll work on project A, on Tuesday I’ll work on project B, and on Wednesday I’ll work on project C — and so on. This is not ideal, because I can’t get completely into the groove with any of them, but I’m inching forward on all of them.
“I guess what I’ve learned,” Moore continues, “is that writing always bobs like a buoy to the surface of my life, no matter what else is going on around me. I’m glad for that.”
What do you think? Do you have a preferred day for writing? Is there a day you tend to avoid? I tend to not write on the weekends, but occasionally will squeeze in a few minutes on a Saturday to do some revising of a project.
Image from the cult classic movie Office Space, via this LinkedIn post.
Andy writes! 
I like to schedule writing first thing in the morning on Mondays. It means I get to start the week doing something I absolutely love and make progress on writing. Which is a great motivator for the week. I actually just finished writing the last installment of my serialized short story this morning. Now I just need to edit it and schedule it for the newsletter.
I also like doing writing towards the end of the week, like Thursday or Friday.
Sounds like we take a similar approach.
Indeed. It just feels nice starting the week with something exciting as opposed to “work.”