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Science

Mondays Are the Worst, Data Science Proves (qz.com) 103

Posted by msmash from the you're-not-alone dept.
An anonymous shares a report: People who are miserable on Monday have lots of company. It's the worst day of the week for millions, according to researchers at the University of Vermont Complex Systems Center who analyze Twitter messages for happiness sentiment. Mood tends to improve during the rest of the week, peaking on Saturday, before beginning to crash again, according to data based tweets since 2008. In this analysis, the university's "hedonometer" takes a random sample of about 50 million Twitter posts each day, which is roughly 10% of all the site's message traffic. The researchers have assigned average scores to more than 10,000 commonly used words (from 1 to 9, on a scale of increasing happiness), which are used to measure a particular day's happiness. The data can also offer some insight into how populations have responded to major events. The day after the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 2 was Twitter's saddest day on record, according to the University of Vermont research. Another low was recorded on May 2, 2011, when Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind thousands of murders, was killed. Rather than clear positivity, language used on Twitter "reflected that a very negatively viewed character met a very negative end," according to the researcher's website.
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Mondays Are the Worst, Data Science Proves More

Mondays Are the Worst, Data Science Proves

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  • we find it is better to fire someone on firday (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:10PM (#55336243)

    as it leads to fewer incidents. Monday is the worst day

    • Well that way the former employee has a weekend to explain to people who noticed that they are out of the job.

    • Re: we find it is better to fire someone on firday (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's why I always come to work drunk on Fridays. It help provide a coping mechanism in case I ever do get fired. It makes my job as an air traffic controller that much easier.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chrisq ( 894406 )

      as it leads to fewer incidents. Monday is the worst day

      With the advent of instant messaging why not do it on the weekend. Think how grateful they will be not to have to get up on Monday!

      • and then will have to come in to get there stuff / return any work stuff / sign paper work. Now do you want them to have time to plan to do something or pop it on them on a work day?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      That's why I always take Fridays off [youtube.com].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      I have retired and I work hard at making Mondays a quite specific day, a do nothing day, my have fun only day and that is lazy fun day, not active fun day (wont even pay bills on a Monday). Mondies suck becaue of the dirtiest four letter word on the planet, 'ewww', work (often very shitty super boring crap work), yuck.

  • Mondays are the worst if you make them that way. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ErikTheRed ( 162431 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:14PM (#55336283) Homepage

    I don't have bad Mondays, in general. I love my job - not ever moment of it; people and situations will occasionally annoy, but in general I'm a happy camper at work. If you don't love your job, then you should either find something else or find a way to love it. There's no extra reward for going through life miserable.

    • I don't have bad Mondays, in general. I love my job - not ever moment of it; people and situations will occasionally annoy, but in general I'm a happy camper at work. If you don't love your job, then you should either find something else or find a way to love it. There's no extra reward for going through life miserable.

      I wouldn't say I love my job. I don't love being in IT, I accidentally fell into IT. However, I don't hate my job either and I think I couldn't ask for a better boss or employer. So, no, I don't hate Mondays... if anything midweek is what I hate most- I've had several days of work to deal with and still not time for a weekend in the immediate future.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There is probably a correlation with people who post on twitter about how terrible their life is every Monday and the type of people who even use twitter.

      Maybe Monday sucks for these people because they think posting about shit twitter will do something while people who don't post on twitter are making life changing improvements?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Pfff. Loving your job doesn't make "hating" Mondays impossible. The fact you don't grasp the notion shows, at the least, that your weekends could be a lot better.

      For me, bad Mondays is about loving weekends with family and friends (a bit too much maybe).

      • Similarly, for many, it is not that they dislike their job, it is that they dislike doing their job while hungover.

      • Personally, I'm not over keen on Tuesdays. At least on Monday you're arriving fresh to the fray. By Wednesday you're half way to the end.

    • There are jobs that don't suck but this is one of those myths that floats around and makes people feel dissatisfied thinking the grass should be greener. If people genuinely loved their jobs companies would make you pay to get to do it rather than pay you for doing it. That is how life works.

      Whatever your job satisfaction level, your satisfaction level with your free time, family, and friends is going to be higher so there is plenty of reason to be happier about the weekend and have some level of reduced sa

    • I don't have bad Mondays, in general. I love my job - not ever moment of it; people and situations will occasionally annoy, but in general I'm a happy camper at work. If you don't love your job, then you should either find something else or find a way to love it. There's no extra reward for going through life miserable.

      True happiness can't be generated at work IMO. If it was that great, someone would be doing it for free & you would be out of a job. Personally, unless someone wants to pay me for hanging out with my family, friends, furry animals, doing fun stuff like hiking, kayaking, SUPing, watching good movies, cooking/eating great food laughing my ass off with my wacky wife (DAMN I love my life!), Mondays will not be the greatest day of the week. WTF happened to the 4 day work week??!

      • Unless what scratches one of your Aspie nerd itches is normally something that is complex enough that people have a hard time with it, and generally don't like doing it, and thus the market pays handsomely for it. Now, while that's not 100% of my job duty, it's currently about 40% and growing at a good clip. Mondays are great because I get to go play. Monday mornings suck however, because we front loaded *all* of our meetings such that I have 4 hours of scheduled meetings every Monday in the first 5 hour

    • You are assuming that you live in an area, or have credentials to do the job you love, or the job you love, pays enough to survive, and there are not too much people who would also love such a job that you will need to be the best of the best to get it.

      While there isn't a reward for going though life miserable, there is less reward if you cannot eat, or have shelter. Because you refuse to do a job that you just don't like.

      While overall I am OK with my job, I wouldn't call it a dream job. But the joy of n

      • I think that's a fair point.

        However there is a distinct difference between what you experience and something soul crushing. My epiphany moment was sitting in a dental chair, getting an emergency root canal, with an infection bad enough that there was no way to numb it short of either knocking me out (and I had no insurance so...) or "direct infiltration of lidocaine" into the tooth as he was drilling.

        Drill - ouch - pause, insert needle - *OUCH* - wait repeat.
        It was absolutely horrific and I would have said

        • Normally if a job sucked that much. I would be actively hunting for a new job. However more to the point, it isn’t that you shouldn’t leave miserable jobs that you hate, but don’t expect to be working in a job that you absolutely love either. There are a lot of talented unemployed people who’s sense of entitlement is preventing them from being productive citizens. Just because their job isn’t as fun as their hobbies.

          • There are a lot of talented unemployed people who’s sense of entitlement is preventing them from being productive citizens.

            I see you've met my ex... 6 degrees (all 4.0)... finally got a part time job at HD after I was laid off and she couldn't mooch as much in support anymore.

    • This is a non-sequitor. I like my job a lot, I still hate mondays. Matter of fact, whenever I took a vacation day on monday, I felt much better for the rest of the work week.

    • I just don't know, and your post makes me depressed. The problem is there isn't anything I like doing all the time. And even choosing from among the various things I like doing, they generally don't line up between what I want to do now, and what my employer needs done now.
      It's not really the activities of work that I don't like, it's the fact that I don't get to decide when to start or stop them.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I don't have bad Mondays, in general. I love my job - not ever moment of it; people and situations will occasionally annoy, but in general I'm a happy camper at work. If you don't love your job, then you should either find something else or find a way to love it. There's no extra reward for going through life miserable.

      I would also add try not having one for a few months and let me know how well that goes for ya? Monday will be the very best day of the week fast when have a job again. People take so many things for granted today. Guess what? Your stuff aint free.

    • Do you make a point to keep to the same sleep/wake schedule on the weekends as the weekdays? Because that's what does it for Mondays for me.

      I love what I do, and am generally happy at work, too. But going out and being social on Friday and Saturday nights, then sleeping late on Saturday and Sunday morning, is just enough of a shift to my body's expectation of when I'll be going to bed and waking up to make me groggy and miserable Monday mornings.

  • Marvin, the Paranoid Robot (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:19PM (#55336329)

    The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.

  • Water is Wet! (Score:3)

    by forkfail ( 228161 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:25PM (#55336359)

    Water is Wet!
    The Sun Rises in the East!
    The more birthdays you have had, the older you are!
    vi is the One True Editor!

    And yes, more often than most other days, Mondays suck.

  • Why I work Tue-Sat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HalAtWork ( 926717 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:26PM (#55336375)

    I can't deal with all the shitty attitudes of Monday. I start my work week on Tuesday when people have gotten over all that. On Saturday when there's less people I feel like I have a more relaxing catch-up day where I can be productive, tying up loose ends and doing what I can to prepare for the next week.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by orlanz ( 882574 )

      That is actually a pretty cool idea. Monday's are a great day to get normal life stuff done. I used to kind of do Sunday 6pm to Friday 11am. Fridays & Saturdays were great but Sundays was a bit cramped wrapping up personal stuff.

      • Yes! Stuff is open on Mondays, including doctors' offices and government offices! In addition, people generally don't make plans on Mondays so you can usually relax that evening before work starts on Tuesday.

    • You but kind of sucks when your friends want to do stuff and you are at work or you chill on a Monday and places close earlier and you feel guilty for not being in the office etc

  • Thank you captain obvious... (Score:3)

    by theNetImp ( 190602 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:28PM (#55336395)

    eom...

  • I love Mondays (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:50PM (#55336565)

    The two days of the week I look forward to most are Sunday and Wednesday, since those are the days of greatest fellowship with my brothers and sisters in Christ.

    Monday isn't a drag at all - just the opposite really - as I get to spend time developing my devotional for Wednesday evening group and studying for my Tuesday evening bible class. It's always a day of being richly in the Word so I would hardly call it the "worst" day.

    I think Thursday is probably my least favorite day, which is not to say that it's a bad day... it's just coming down from Sunday -> Wednesday marathon of scripture, prayer, and fellowship.

  • Looks like (Score:3)

    by CodeHog ( 666724 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {rekcals.eoj}> on Monday October 09, 2017 @01:42PM (#55336971) Homepage
    somebody has a case of the Mondays.
  • If you work a normal five day week, you stay up late Friday because you don't have to get up for work on Saturday. Saturday night you stay up even later, probably partying. Sunday, you get up very late and aren't ready for bed until late at night. Then, you have to get up Monday morning at your regular time and go to work even though you didn't get nearly enough sleep the night before. Of course you feel bad on Monday; what else would you expect?

  • (I didn't read the article, so...)

    What exactly is "data science"?

    • Data science is one of those modern terms that currently means whatever you want it to. In this case, the article was referring to "large wombat of the ugly variety". Either that or "sampling and statistics" - I get those mixed up all the time.

  • At least with Mondays you still have the after glow of the weekend to keep you happy.

    Tuesday is by far the worst day of the week. It's not even half way through and the glow of the weekend is long gone.

    Honestly, why do we even have 7 day weeks? Let's get rid of a day in the week preferably Saturday so we can match up better with the Muslim religious days. Now with a 6 day week, we can eliminate the weird cacophony month system where some are 30, others are 31, and February with its weird 28 days.

    This can al

    • How does the length of a week have anything to do with the number of days in a month?

      The Islamic calendar has 7 days a week, how does making weeks 6 days better match up with the Muslim religious days?

      The 7 day week has been around for over 2600 years.

  • Rather than clear positivity, language used on Twitter "reflected that a very negatively viewed character [bin Laden] met a very negative end," according to the researcher's website.

    I don't know the politics of people who use Twitter. But the pictures [chicagotribune.com] that I saw showed Americans happy that bin Laden been killed.

  • If I could sleep on Sunday nights, maybe they wouldn't be so bad. But for something like 8 years running, come Sunday night I'm usually tossing and turning for an extra hour or two, and when I do fall asleep it feels like I'm just barely skimming the surface. I'll roll over and look at the clock at 2 a.m., and first think I still haven't slept at all, and then realize I can remember dreaming, but otherwise seems like I'm still on edge.

    I don't know that this is about work. I'm usually not thinking about work

  • Garfield did it, he hates Mondays

  • ... semi retired. I work when I want and set my own schedule. Mondays are good because the crowds are back at work and I have everything to myself. Tuesdays even better because all the bosses have called employees who ditched on Monday and told them to get their ass back to work or else.

  • And somebody was happy to take that money!

  • ... Thursdays are usually my worst days of the week since things can get hectic even when I am unemployed. http://aqfl.net/node/1234 [aqfl.net] has a poll that shows Mondays are the worst days to my visitors.

  • The worst day of the week is not Monday, but it is Tuesday. Think about it...

    On Monday you're still coming off the high of the weekend, you're sharing the stories of all the amazing things that occurred over the last two days, you're meeting people you've not seen since the Friday before (usually). Tuesday, however, is a different story... The weekend high is gone, the stories are all told, and the weekend is still so far away - the work week is not even half way through. Wednesday is when things start turn

  • We're doing it again -- measuring people via an obviously biased subset of people. Twitter isn't everybody, by any stretch of the imagination, and it is certainly the more "socially-dependent" subset of people. Add uneven distribution to the list of considerations, and what you've actually discovered is that people whose daily routine is dependent on socializing with other people (via twitter at the very least) cycles with the work week.

    Big surprise: people who use social networking to fulfil their mood h

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