It has been a week and a half since my boss told me I could take my side “research” project and work on it more actively. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to really do that since I’ve gotten sidetracked every single day by something that came up and required my attention. I did get to spend one evening of work earlier this week doing research on some of the tools I’d be using and I got to have a chat with a few people about how to make this useful for them, but I haven’t made much forward progress because the other people I need to talk to are busy during every free moment I’ve got. Between not being able to access people and running into my own time and energy limitations, I’ve actually done less work on this project in the last week and a half than I did in the single week prior. There’s just been so much going on and I’ve been unable to pull myself away from most of it since, after all, this project isn’t really my job. It is now a thing my boss doesn’t mind me working on, but I think we’re both aware that he meant I had to still keep up with the stuff that features more heavily in my job description.

Despite this frustration and the mounting feeling of being overwhelmed as I try to cram work into any spare handful of minutes I can eke out of my daily grind, it has not been a bad week. It has been an exhausting one, especially since I’m going to visit a friend and tying to make sure that I don’t wind up falling short of my hours goal or getting to my friends’ place after 10pm (it is a three hour drive and I’m usually done with work around seven in the evening during my normal ten-hour day schedule). I’ve been cramming as many hours into a day as I can stand and that’s all besides having a number of doctor appointments this week. Nothing severe, thankfully, but definitely a time commitment I would have l liked to avoid during a week that I’m pushing into eleven and twelve hour days. This would have all been so much more manageable without losing three daytime hours to appointments and extra travel that I could have been working. It would mean I’m not doing a day that’s over twelve hours long (well, thirteen, but one of those hours was going to get bloodwork done) the day before my trip, for one thing. The only real upside to all this is that I’ve not had trouble making sure I’m in bed before midnight at all this week. I’ve been so tired at night that, save last night, when I got home super late and had to still make dinner so I wound up finishing my meal at about half past ten, I’ve actually started getting ready for bed earlier than I planned to.

What I really need is a day or two of working from home, where the many distractions and inopportune interruptions of the office can’t reach me. Sure, I’d probably have gotten calls or messages if I hadn’t been in the office this week, but those are much easier to eventually end than when someone comes to your office and wants your help rewiring the local network so they can try to replicate a test you ran but with different controls and a slightly different network configuration. I would not have gotten caught up in the three hours of troubleshooting that followed that moment, either, if I’d been working from home. I’d have gotten roped in the next day, of course, but I’d have actually gotten stuff done yesterday instead of running around until I was so tired it took all of my facous to stay standing at my desk. To be entirely fair, though, there’s been enough stuff going on that I doubt I’d have gotten away with dodging it entirely. I’d probably just have been even more busy today, instead. Some of it would have been solved without me, but the main reason I got roped into it at all is because I’ve developed a very particular expertise and knowledge over the past two months of work and that has been in high demand ever since people realized I’ve got it.

All I can do is hope that it has mostly tapered off at this point [it has not and looks like it won’t for a few more weeks]. I am hoping to take a day next week to work from home and make some progress on this project once I’ve managed to track down everyone I need to talk to and hopefully gotten ahead of the spate of problems that have come up in the local network run, but we will have to see if that happens. My boss still doesn’t much care for employees working from home, but I really do get so much more done when I can. It’s a much more comfortable environment and I can focus so much better when I’m not getting pulled into things or interrupted by people who want to chat. I don’t mind chatting with my coworkers, but they always seem to want to do it only on the days that I’m trying to cram a bunch of knowledge into my head and can’t really afford the ramp up and down time required to get into and out of my project. Also, I’d be able to sleep in a little later if I work from home (since I can ride my exercise bike while dealing with my emails and various project queues and don’t need to do my full workout BEFORE I go into work). I could really use the rest. Everything seems so much more manageable when you’re not exhausted and this project is big and daunting enough without the extra layer of mental and physical exhaustion making it difficult to push through the intimidation factor.

I should be able to convince my boss that I need a day to work from home. Even before the pandemic, I’d occasionally take a day to work from home on the days where I really needed to focus on something, so it shouldn’t be difficult to do. I’m just getting way too caught up in my own head about it since I know that he doesn’t really approve of working from home even though he will give permission for me to do it. It’s plain enough in his demeanor and occasional comments that he doesn’t need to come out and say it. Nor do I really want to push him to the point where he feels the need to come out and say it. I just really need a job that is more malleable than this one. I really like working from home when I feel the need AND being able to come into the office when I don’t want to be in my apartment. A hybrid style situation would be best. Maybe if I ever get a job that doesn’t involve testing with heavy machinery I’ll be able to make it happen. Someday.