Today (specifically the day I’m writing this, not the day you’re reading this), I’m whiling away my afternoon as I mostly just keep plates spinning at work. We’re rapidly approaching the holiday season and not a lot is getting done since the office will be closed a week from now. It’ll only be closed for the holidays for a few work days, but that’s already more than we usually get, so everyone’s really feeling a proglonged version of the “friday afternoon” complaceny that tends to hit the office. No one expects much to happen and those of us who are still trying to get things done are pretty much out of luck. So, instead of getting anything done that I had planned to do today (since some of the stuff I needed to do any of that work is officially eight days past due), I’m just trying to keep people from forgetting stuff that I need them to do. It’s boring work, comprised of a lot of writing down lists and looking through my emails and chat messages for the latest updates, but it’s pretty much all I can do right now that is still going to help me complete all my high-priority work before the holidays. Hopefully, anyway. I’m only in the office for four days next week and then I’ll be gone from the office for twelve (total days, not work days, unfortunately), so my window to get anything done before 2024 rolls around is rapidly shrinking [and has officially closed, thanks to holiday delays stretching from US Thanksgiving to the beginning of 2024, so none of that stuff will actually get done this year].

I wish I had the energy to work on my personal projects and some of the less urgent but still important work. I’ve been putting so many things off in favor of working on things that are both important and urgent (and sometimes are an actual minor crisis that needs addressing ASAP), but I know that all I’d really be able to do is get my head back into the right space for those projects before I exhausted myself or ran out of time to work on them. I mean, sure, I could stay at work super late on a Friday night and get more done, but I really don’t want to do that. I want to go home at a less late hour than usual (which is funny to say since I’m pretty sure I’ll still be the last one at the office even though I’ll be leaving an hour earlier than every other night this week) and so I’m spending my time sending emails, finding due dates, and just being an organized person in general because it sometimes feels like no one else is willing to do that work. We can only get so far by winging things and I’m frequently frustrated by how often it makes my life more difficult when other people flout deadlines and wind up just eating into the time I have to work since my deadlines can’t move.

I’m also frustrated because I’ve spend a week prepared to drop everything I’m doing and start working on a project, but I’ve had to keep doing other stuff because we’re missing parts for that project. I mean, I get it. I really do. We’re approaching the holidays, some people have already taken off for the rest of the year, and no one really wants to do much because everyone is thinking about travel, celebrations, their families, gift-giving, the various religious practices associated with some of the holidays, and so on. No one wants to focus on work. I’m just still focused on work because I know how awful my first week of 2024 is going to be if I don’t get anything else done before the end of 2023. Though, to be fair, there’s still no guarantee that I’ll get any of the stuff I’m waiting on while I’m out for the holidays. I could come back in early January and still wind up waiting for things to get delivered…

Honestly, I’m just really looking forward to not working. I want to try to get things into a place where they won’t be a mess when I come back to the office (which wasn’t supposed to be difficult because I’ll actually be missing only four days when other people will be in the office), but I’ve literally never left work for more than one day and come back to find anything but a mess waiting for me. Sometimes I can’t even make it a single day. Hell, half the time I work from home, I miss something important happening because no one thinks to tell people who aren’t physically at the office that something is happening. So my expectations are that things will be messy when I get back, that I’ll have missed something important that no one will be prepared to catch me up on, and that everything I asked people to do or monitor while I was gone will have been ignored except for the one thing that really didn’t matter. Which isn’t really my coworkers’ fault. We’re all swamped these days and anything not at the top of our personal to-do lists generally doesn’t get done and other people’s work is almost never at the top of our to-do lists. We’ve all got enough of our own stuff to do.