The Full Days, The Busy Days

Two days in a row now, I haven’t gotten to eating lunch until around 3:30 PM. Good and bad, it seems. There’s lots of work to be done, and I’m thankful to be in a position where I’m employed and *have* work that needs to be done.

There’s more work than can be handled by us, really. It’s been like this, even when I was brought on board. It seems as though the workload and stress we all take at work just builds and builds. More things get piled on, and before long everyone’s struggling just to keep pace, let alone make any progress. Typically around that time, some sort of venting happens – either at meetings, or over booze.

I work with some really unique folks. All of us have incredibly strong work ethics, to our detriment. The typical office boss, in my mind, is someone who motivates – who has to get his/her workers moving and cranking and really going. At my place of work, I almost feel like we need the exact opposite: we need someone who will interrupt us and stop us, someone who will tell us to quit working or slow down. We need this because we won’t on our own.

We keep going and going until we reach some personal, internalized boundary line… and then we break. Looking over the past year, this seems like a regular enough occurance that I could probably graph out and predict when the next such instance would be.

It’s weird, but this is a revelation that I had a day ago: at work, we need to be told when to stop working. Because otherwise… we have to tell ourselves to stop. And oftentimes, we don’t.