You shouldn’t have time for a case of the Mondays.

Weekends, ideally, provide you the opportunity to catch up on sleep, get some needed social and family time, and generally recharge your batteries. With that in mind, you might want to consider really getting off and running early in the next week, before your batteries become depleted again.

That’s the logic behind one productivity tip: Schedule your most important tasks each week for Monday and Tuesday. From creativity blog 99U:

Spend less time worrying about planning exactly how long every activity will take you to do and more time front-loading your calendar by putting your most important activities with deadlines early in the day and early in the week. For example, something due on Friday should start appearing in your schedule by Tuesday afternoon. And your amount of planned to-do items should decrease from Monday to Friday with ideally little-to-no new to-do items on Friday.

Why Pay It Forward?

The benefits of this strategy are plentiful.

• First, it ensures that you are at peak energy as you approach your most daunting tasks.
• Second, if you face a low-productivity day later in the week–it’s okay, it happens to the best of us–it helps to make sure those high-priority projects and meetings are already taken care of.
• Third, it frees up time later in the week in case an unexpected and pressing matter comes up.

And finally, if nothing pressing does come up, it allows you to make use of that time however you see fit. Maybe that means taking time to explore new projects, or spending time with parts of your company you don’t get to see very often. Free time, used the right way, can be a very positive thing for any company.

Front-loading your schedule can also serve to get rid of that slow-moving feeling so attached to Mondays. The Mondays, so to speak, are real: One study shows that 80 percent of employees don’t want to go to work on Mondays. You can imagine the kind of effect that attitude has on motivation and engagement right at the start of the week.

Productivity blogger Dave Navarro writes that by putting important tasks on a Monday, you don’t have time to get stuck in the doldrums:

Front loading is simply the act of slamming out results in the early part of the schedule, rather than the latter. In other words, move your “crunch time” to the very start. By forcing yourself to think in crunch mode right off the bat, you’ll have a much easier time of avoiding distractions, staying focused, and delivering great results.