It’s not when you are working that you realize how tired and exhausted you are. It’s on that moment when you finally stop and breath in for a minute and let your mind wander off.
That is when everything comes crashing down and you see just how many stop signs you ignored or simply couldn’t follow. I feel like that today, like a string being stretched almost to the breaking point, jumping from work to freelance tasks and other projects to the point of not having “room to think”.
I did learn some things in the process. One is to leave one night once in a while to just do nothing, the other is not to look at my task list as a rush job. It’s not that I don’t take my time to do things well, it’s the fact that long task lists used to cause a bit of anxiety. Instead, now I negotiate deadlines and question the validity of adding something to the list. Does it really need to be done or is it a “nice to have” ? Does it fall under my direct responsibility or someone else’s ? (One of the problems of having skills in very different areas is that at some point you try to do everything yourself)
But the important bit here, is “room to think”. It’s getting things done at a proper pace and not having too many consecutive tasks that demand high levels of concentration all at once. I haven’t had room to think. This led to levels of frustration I never had in my whole career.
For all this, and an entire world of reasons, I am pulling the brakes. For the next two weeks I’m switching off emails, logging off facebook, leaving the car at home and doing whatever it takes to get my energy and motivation back up.
