Monday 30 May 2011

Back to Life, Back to Reality

Fatigue. It's a python that slowly coils itself around your frantically beating heart and squeeze, squeeze, squeezes (brief homage to Suzanne Somers) the last pathetic drops of your brain's vital essence, the juice that keeps you from doing dumb stuff like dropping your keys five times while trying to open your door, or missing the turn to your own street on the way home from work. The thing is, you don't REALLY realize the extent of the damage until you escape fatigue's cold clutches. Only then do you realize that your half-functioning brain (if that) even functions at full capacity. After weeks of 6-minus hours of sleep per night, after a full weekend of NOTHING but rest, rest, rest, am I feeling like a human being. Begone, foul zombie of the night of no return! I'm whole again, and I am thankful.

People in this country wear fatigue like a badge of honor. You tell someone that you've only slept 6 hours the previous night, and that person feels obligated to one-up your sleep deprivation by claiming to only have slept 5. Wayyy to go, buddy. You're even more of a zombie than I am. Let's see who can be the MOST sleep deprived so that we can all function like idiots. Good god, no wonder people are sniffling and sneezing every five minutes in this country! If anything kills us all, it will be lack of sleep.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of workers in the world: One is the so-called "workaholic", who, through a clearly learned sense of misplaced workplace ethics clocks in and does not clock out until "the job is done." This is the guy or gal who's always at the office, slaving away at his or her desk, freaking out over the heaps and heaps of work that has to be done.

Worker two is the "work is just a job" worker. This worker places his or her own personal well-being over the importance of the job getting done, and will not compromise his or her own life for work. These people seem to be the happier bunch, overall, and are generally more productive than the first worker, who usually, in spite of his or her best intentions, actually lowers his or her productivity level by burning out too quickly.

Admittedly, because I work for a start-up and because there are certain things that have ridden on my back recently, I've been more of a Worker #1. Yuck. Adjusting to growing pains, however, I will soon switch over to being mostly Worker #2, mostly because, um, I want to have a life, and because I want to actually get back into writing projects and running, which, with being Worker #1, is practically impossible because of the aforementioned fatigue.

So, goal #1 is simple: sleep more, work less. And the rest snaps right into place as it should. No more zombie. Braiiinnnsss, I need Braiiinnnsss!

No comments: