Submitted by nikkiana (not verified) on Thu, 2008-03-27 23:55.
I don’t know if this is helpful for your situation or not, but I found life to go a lot smoother once I came to a place where I could accept things as they are, not as they should be.
I came to the realization not too terribly long ago that a large part of my troubles were the fact I was trying to superimpose the lifestyle lived by the average American 9 to 5 onto my personal situation. I live in New Hampshire and have a circadian rhythm that thinks it lives in Honolulu. I have a job that mostly allows for “Work whenever. Just as long as it gets done.”
Yet, every morning when I woke up at 11 AM I was berating myself for not getting up at 8. I’d start working 1 or 2 in the afternoon. By 5 PM, I’d be berating myself for not having everything done. When my husband got home, I was resentful because he was done working for the day and I wasn’t. I’d try to work while he watched TV and end up getting distracted and frustrated. Then I’d feel like I had to go to sleep at 10 with him, sometimes I’d try and toss and turn until I finally would give up and go back to work. Other times I’d just stay up and work and feel insanely guilty about the fact I wasn’t ready to go to bed.
When I started ignoring what everyone else’s life looked like and stopped fighting against what my body and mind were naturally inclined to do, things started going more smoothly for the most part.
Identifying if you’re really being a workaholic helps with the perspective… It’s been my observation that most of us web folk is that most got into this profession by being passionately addicted to online communication in the first place… That being the case, there’s generally blogs to read, videos to be watched, and IM conversations to be had that are all on varying levels of not being particularly related to work but since you’re at The Machine the entire time, you feel like you “worked” 15 hours because you spent that much time sitting at The Machine but you only really worked 8. Situations where you’re strung out because something’s due in two days aside, I’d be surprised if the majority of us were truly workaholics. It’s probably more likely we have an Internet addiction and are afflicted by pingaholicism (guilty as charged… I made it a whole ten minutes this evening sitting in the other room before I couldn’t stand not having my laptop with me because I couldn’t see IRC).
More than anything, I think, it’s a trial and error process of trying to figure out what works for you…
I don’t know if this is
I don’t know if this is helpful for your situation or not, but I found life to go a lot smoother once I came to a place where I could accept things as they are, not as they should be.
I came to the realization not too terribly long ago that a large part of my troubles were the fact I was trying to superimpose the lifestyle lived by the average American 9 to 5 onto my personal situation. I live in New Hampshire and have a circadian rhythm that thinks it lives in Honolulu. I have a job that mostly allows for “Work whenever. Just as long as it gets done.”
Yet, every morning when I woke up at 11 AM I was berating myself for not getting up at 8. I’d start working 1 or 2 in the afternoon. By 5 PM, I’d be berating myself for not having everything done. When my husband got home, I was resentful because he was done working for the day and I wasn’t. I’d try to work while he watched TV and end up getting distracted and frustrated. Then I’d feel like I had to go to sleep at 10 with him, sometimes I’d try and toss and turn until I finally would give up and go back to work. Other times I’d just stay up and work and feel insanely guilty about the fact I wasn’t ready to go to bed.
When I started ignoring what everyone else’s life looked like and stopped fighting against what my body and mind were naturally inclined to do, things started going more smoothly for the most part.
Identifying if you’re really being a workaholic helps with the perspective… It’s been my observation that most of us web folk is that most got into this profession by being passionately addicted to online communication in the first place… That being the case, there’s generally blogs to read, videos to be watched, and IM conversations to be had that are all on varying levels of not being particularly related to work but since you’re at The Machine the entire time, you feel like you “worked” 15 hours because you spent that much time sitting at The Machine but you only really worked 8. Situations where you’re strung out because something’s due in two days aside, I’d be surprised if the majority of us were truly workaholics. It’s probably more likely we have an Internet addiction and are afflicted by pingaholicism (guilty as charged… I made it a whole ten minutes this evening sitting in the other room before I couldn’t stand not having my laptop with me because I couldn’t see IRC).
More than anything, I think, it’s a trial and error process of trying to figure out what works for you…