Weekly Observations: Week 48
On (im)balance. I maxed out on PTO this week — a full 31.5 days. I’ve always ridden the edge of being just about to max out, but have generally been good about drawing enough down to stay under the limit. I’ve been reflecting on work life balance recently, but seeing that notice come through in my inbox that was quite the rude awakening. Yes, work has taken over your life, Steph.
Exhibit A: I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone that hasn’t been about work these past five days. These days, it feels like I’m becoming more and more of a robot, unable to talk to people about anything else except for work. I don’t joke around as much anymore, don’t tease as much anymore — an unintended case of how work bleeds into life, I suppose: as I’ve needed to rely less on traditional relationship building to be effective (in general, a good thing work-wise), it’s also made me more serious, less human, and more clinically efficient with my time, interactions with people. I mean — don’t get me wrong, I love talking about work and solving problems (basically what I get to do all day), but there is such a thing as too damn much of anything.
Exhibit B: I blew off two post-work things last week in favor of … staying at work. For one instance, fine — justifiable with an emergency project put on my plate, but the other most certainly wasn’t. It scares me sometimes how easy the transition is, how slippery that slope is from riding that healthy edge of busy to staying routinely at work for >12 hours a day. Yes, yes, I tell myself that I work out, eat lunch and dinner on campus, don’t work outside of my time in the office, but still. Despite being constantly reminded that I’m not obligated to give my life to the man and being warned that they’re naturally incentivized to squeeze every bit of productivity out of me (thanks Mindy), I still find myself here.
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For someone that prides themselves on living an intentional life, I’m disappointed in myself. It’s not like I didn’t realize this was becoming a pattern, but I suppose there’s a boiled frog element here at play — it’s easy for things to get gradually worse and worse until you wake up one day and you realize you’re basically living at the office. So this is how it happens, alas.
