Is it possible for a Friday afternoon at work to be anything other than a wasteland?

Jobs can vary in any number of different ways (blue/white collar, factory/office, etc.), but I’d say one consistent is that Friday afternoon is usually dead. Maybe if you work at a bar or in a service industry job, this might be a bit different — but probably not before 5pm. At around 2pm, 3pm on a Friday afternoon, there just isn’t a lot going on. Again, it varies — but I think that argument is relatively sound. (Of course, we all have worked with the total gasbag who schedules some 90-minute deep dive on some major strategy for 3:30pm on a Friday. Every soul in that meeting is completely checked out.)

There is some logic to how to manage your time day-by-day in a job, but many people do not follow said logic. Instead, we tend to have workplaces where “busy” matters more than “productive.” We also tend to have workplaces where the quantity of work done matters more than the quality of it. In sum: most people aren’t very good users of their own time. We’ve been trying to “growth hack” this deal for years — maybe Big Data can help us! — and we’re still not exactly there yet. There’s a psychological element to all this, of course. People often look to work for self-worth and definition, and “having a lot on your plate” is certainly one way to provide that.