(And How to Structure Your Week as a Small Business Owner)
If you’re a small business owner who feels behind before the week even starts, there’s a good chance your calendar is the problem.
Specifically: Mondays full of meetings, errands, and appointments.
This is one of the fastest ways to create overwhelm, stress, and a constant feeling of playing catch-up in your business.
Let’s talk about why.
The real problem with Monday meetings
Most business owners come into Monday with:
- a full inbox from the weekend
- loose ends that need to be tied up
- tasks that didn’t get finished the week before
- a to-do list that already feels too long
And then you stack meetings, appointments, errands, and commitments on top of that.
What happens?
You start the week reactive instead of proactive.
You’re answering other people’s questions before you’ve even looked at your own priorities.
That’s where the stress and overwhelm start.
Why Mondays feel overwhelming for business owners
When Mondays are packed with meetings, appointments, or errands, business owners tend to experience:
- the “Sunday scaries” because there’s no margin
- a constant feeling of being behind
- transferring the same to-do list from day-to-day and week-to-week
- mental clutter that spills into the rest of the week
You never fully catch up.
Instead of running your week, your week runs you.
What changes when Mondays are protected
When you remove everything you can from Mondays, everything shifts.
Monday becomes a reset day.
It’s the day you:
- clean up email
- tie up loose threads
- get back to clients and return calls
- finish what didn’t get done last week
- decide what actually matters this week
You’re no longer letting other people decide your priorities.
You’re deciding first.
As I like to tell my coaching clients: You want to come at your week instead of letting your week come at you.
Why this creates better focus the rest of the week
Here’s what I see over and over again with clients:
When Mondays are meeting-free, business owners:
- focus better and longer Tuesday through Friday
- stop bouncing between tasks and conversations
- forget fewer things
- feel calmer and more grounded
- feel more in control
- move faster without feeling rushed
👉They come at their week instead of bracing for it.
That one decision creates a ripple effect in your whole business.
“But what will people say if I don’t take Monday meetings?”
This is the fear almost everyone has.
And here’s what actually happens in real life.
I had a service-based business owner who was a virtual assistant.
All of her clients wanted Monday meetings.
She was nervous, but she asked if they’d be willing to move meetings to Tuesdays so she could prepare better and make more progress for them.
Every single client agreed.
A few even said they didn’t like Monday meetings either!
Protecting Monday didn’t hurt her business.
It improved it.
She was able to get more done and her clients were happier.
How to structure your week as a business owner (a simple framework)
Here’s a clean way to think about your week:
- Monday: Admin, catch-up, planning
- Tuesday: Content creation or meetings
- Wednesday: Growth (marketing and sales)
- Thursday: Deep work
- Friday: CEO work and planning
This doesn’t mean every day has to look perfect.
And it doesn’t mean you follow that theme for the whole day – just the first chunk of the day.
I coach for free on this system Monday-Friday in Instagram Stories. Click here to check it out.
This simple rhythm just gives your brain a default.
And defaults reduce overwhelm.
A quick faith-based perspective
Scripture reminds us that God is a God of order, not chaos.
Order doesn’t mean rigid schedules or perfection.
It means creating space to steward your business well.
The word steward might sound all stuffy but it basically just means taking care of what’s been given to us – the same way we want our kids to take care of their new toys or tech!
Protecting Monday is one simple way to do that.
The bottom line
If you constantly feel behind in your business, don’t just keep working harder.
Start by protecting your Monday.
Remove meetings.
Learn to schedule appointments & coffee dates on a different day.
Create margin. (I don’t know about you but I’m just a nicer person when I have more margin!)
Decide what matters before the week gets loud.
This one small rule changes everything.
Want help making your week feel lighter?
One of the biggest reasons Mondays feel overwhelming is because content keeps hanging over your head all week.
If writing a weekly newsletter stresses you out, I teach a simple system for batching 12 weeks of newsletters in under three hours.
You can learn it inside Newsletter Batching Made Easy.
And if this kind of structure is helpful to you, you can also follow me on Instagram for more systems like this.
