Admit it, you also happened to drive into Yandex or Google the sacramental question “what day is it today?” or look for the answer in your phone? Psychologists say that this strange forgetfulness usually overtakes us in the middle of the week.
A vacation is not only new landscapes, but also a short period of time when we can rightfully forget what date and day of the week it is. With the end of the holiday season, we, alas, lose this right. However, we still do not remember our coordinates in time very firmly – evidence of this are dozens of Internet services that readily remind us what day it is (as well as month and year – for the most forgetful, apparently). At the same time, we easily distinguish Friday from Monday, for example, but Wednesday and Thursday are always practically indistinguishable from each other.
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Psychologists from Lincoln University (Great Britain) seem to have managed to solve this riddle. According to the results of their study, it’s all about the number of associations associated in our minds with each day of the week. To begin with, the scientists asked all participants in the experiment (more than 1200 people) to name their own associations for each of the days. Monday was the champion. The associations associated with it were, it is true, almost entirely negative, but, as mentioned above, the point is not in quality, but in quantity.
This was confirmed by the further course of the study. Throughout the working week, psychologists daily tried to take participants by surprise with the question “what day is it today?”. And we found that on Monday and Friday, the answer to this question required an average of about 600 milliseconds. And on Wednesday – almost 1400 milliseconds, that is, more than two times more. Tuesday and Thursday fell into the intermediate category (about 1200 and 900 milliseconds, respectively).
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Researchers attribute this difference to the fact that Monday tends to be overwhelmed with negative expectations associated with the start of the work week, while Friday is painted in iridescent tones with anticipation of the weekend. The rest of the working days are almost devoid of a pronounced emotional background and therefore can flow one into another almost imperceptibly. Therefore, if forgetfulness really bothers you, then the best way to overcome it is to get yourself some kind of weekly rituals. Wednesday is the best day for them. So if managers schedule regular meetings and meetings specifically for Wednesday, they are acting in full accordance with these recommendations, helping employees more confidently navigate the workweek.
Groundhog Day (dir. Harold Ramis)
See D. Ellis et. al. “Mental Representations of Weekdays”, online publication on the scientific portal PLOS ONE dated August 19, 2015.