I'm telling you, I was reaching my breaking point, and that's a pretty rare occurence for me when it comes to this kind of work, mainly because for about 99 percent of the time, I don't really feel like I'm working at all when I'm helping others.
But this last month, I've probably worked between 70 to 90 hours each week, especially for the two weeks I was traveling and training.
Part of the problem for me is that I work both a full time and a part time job, so that puts me into the 60 hour a week range from the start. That's not typically too bad, but when trainings and/or traveling is thrown into the mix, what happens is that I wind up using up the part time job hours traveling but then still have obligations to colleagues and commitments for work that have to be met on the part time job, so I end up working full time plus in that position.
When that workload gets placed on top of my full time job and my attempt at some self care in the few off hours I have left, it leaves me with no time to do anything at all but....work.
And the pressure has begun to show in weird ways. I missed a regularly scheduled staff meeting because I was trying to deal with a bit of personal scary news concerning my only surviving immediate family member. I simply got the time of the meeting wrong in my head. No excuses, just didn't remember. My colleague told me I was "getting older" when I mentioned this to him.
Great. So I can add that to the mix as well.
Then I sorta snapped at one of my colleagues when she asked me about a paper that was coming due in the next couple of weeks. She'd asked me about it and I'd mentioned that I needed something to look at as a template. She stated she'd sent it to me already a couple of times.
I think at that point I went into "defensive" mode; I had to explain to her that because I work off three computers, my email was getting a bit hairy to control. Because of that, about two weeks ago I opted to pull all my email accounts into one gmail account so that I had one central location to access my email from.
Unfortunately, when I did that, I had this huge influx of mail into gmail that totaled around 3,000 emails - all freaking unsorted. Page after page of everything from two jobs, all my external work and interests, Facebook crap, newsletters, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum. Thank the Gods they were at least labeled with the email accounts they'd come from!
But, this of course came about the same time I needed to split for Tacoma. So I figured I'd be able to address that little nightmare when I returned and would sort em out, go through all the damned mail and put it into folders, blah blah blah.
By the time I returned on the Redeye Thursday morning from Tacoma and went straight into my home office, I was barely able to function and about the last thing I wanted to do was to sort through thousands of emails, on top of my day job and my obligatory weekly responsiblities for both my full and part time jobs.
So I put it off. When the weekend came, I had one day with my wife, then split to DC for the Homeless Vets conference. I was in DC until Wednesday afternoon but didn't have computer access for much of the day, so when the conference ended at noon, I was forced to find something to do and I ended up sitting down to read, which frankly is never a bad thing. But, it was kind of time wasted, although that happens all the time when one travels.
And lest one think that I'm unhappy with traveling, let me add here that I absolutely love to travel and train; always have, always will. St. Augustine of Hippo said it best: "The world is a book and those who haven't traveled have read only one page."
By the time I returned, I had a major project coming to its deadline and my project team mate happened to be "off the grid" in the back country of Peru, South America. We had some important work that had to be done and unfortunately, the only time I could communicate with him was when he managed to get somewhere that had an internet connection, which I would imagine in the bowels of Peru isn't like heading up to the local Starbucks and jumping on some free public wifi network.
I worked the weekend on that so we'd be able to review and revamp early in the week when he returned from the depths of South America and once again, the email disaster took a back seat.
There was dead silence on the conference line at about this time, and I realized I was....both rambling and partially venting.
One of the great things about working with folks in this kind of job is that they not only understand, they can relate because they've all been there at one point or another. Additionally, they know how important self care is and they also are able to recognize when a coworker is stressed and having some difficulties.
I managed to bring the conversation back into the realm of calm discussion and after the conference call, we talked directly for a while.
During that second call, I was able to tell her that although things were tough at the moment, I've got light at the end of what turned into a very long tunnel. because I don't travel/train until September, our major piece of the project is almost complete (a meeting at 10a today to get final approval as we move forward) and I'll have this weekend to myself; the first one in a long time, I'll be able to focus on me and do a little real self care; time with the wife, riding the motorcycles, hanging on the boat, and playing with the grandkids and the four-legged family members.
I'll sort through the email mess and get some filters set up, do a little creative writing here and hopefully for Change.org, who by the way has been very understanding about my sporadic postings as I do my real life thanngg, even though I'm under contract with them to produce on a regular basis. It's yet another obligation, by the way, that got a little neglected over the past month
Here's probably the biggest rub in all this for me: I woke up this morning thinking "
ah shit, I gotta go to work."It's been many many years since I've had that feeling about work and it's a very loud warning bell for me.
Not sure yet what to do about it and we'll see if it changes after I get a couple of work-free days under my belt. Until then, as my colleague from Operation Stand Down once said after I'd dressed him down over a comment he'd made;
"Don't poke the bear."
