I’ve been taking Fridays off of work lately. I probably shouldn’t, what with rising costs, but I’ve been so burned out that I needed to. Three weeks in a row, I was so worn out by Friday morning that I couldn’t make myself get out of bed on time or I slept through my alarms or felt so awful that I went back to sleep until I stopped feeling bad. It’s not great, to be quite honest. I really do need the money from my weekly overtime if I’m going to survive the upcoming financial crisis (in whatever form it takes) and while I haven’t spent vacation time to take my days off so far, I really need to find a more sustainable way to get through my weeks without entirely burning out by the end of Thursday. Work is demanding, sure, but I’ve also been taking a lot of burdens on myself that I don’t really need to, so maybe I need to dial it back there, or maybe I need to make sure my free time is spent better, in a way that is more rejuvenating or enriching. I really hope it’s the latter because I don’t want to do less stuff and I feel kind of like I’m on the hook for all of it anyway, considering it’s all commitments I’ve made. I could take breaks if I need to, I’m sure no one would begrudge me a week off, but I worry about the precedent that would set for myself. And that taking the time off wouldn’t actually fix things, only let me recover from them, since that means I’d be right back in the shit again the instant I went back to doing things. Work certainly isn’t going to slow down. It’s going to speed up, if anything…
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Getting Back To Work And Thinking About The Future
I’ve been taking it easy for about a month now. Maybe a little more than. After we found out that the final release meeting of my project got delayed until just this past week (as this gets posted), I decided to take my long put-off week of vacation. I unfortunately did it after a full day of work on a Monday, but I still got a decent week away from work by taking the next Monday off. Since then, I’ve been dealing with the fallout of pushing myself as hard as I did and my current medication-induced exhaustion, all of which means that I’ve been avoiding overtime in my work weeks. Mostly by taking days off every week, forcing myself to avoid even doing the “here’s how much overtime I could get” calculous because I can’t get overtime until I’ve got 40 non-PTO hours allocated to a week and I’m not going to work eight “extra” hours without getting my overtime pay. It’d be better to just not use the vacation time in the first place. Anyway, I’ve taken at least one day off each week, mostly dictated by my messed up sleep schedule, overwhelming exhaustion, or my poor physical health. I expected, initially, that I was only going to take it easy for the first two weeks, the ones involving my planned week-off of work, but something has come up every single week since then that has left me with one or more days where I could not force myself into the office.
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