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On the Job Living with the grind
July 17th, 2008
Monday strikes again. You stagger back to work, convinced there’s been some terrible mistake and you should sleep for another year or so.
Nah. The desk is still there, people appear to think you should be there, and the work hasn’t gone away, either.
This routine has been cursed ever since the idea of a working week slithered into existence, back at the turn of the last century. Nobody has ever liked it, except hypochondriacs and martyrs to some vague notion of working until they actually kill themselves.
Surviving this hamster wheel approach to work isn’t easy. It bores people to death, usually metaphorically, but occasionally literally.
Not that the fact of showing up for 5 days out of 7 actually makes anything more efficient, either. It never has. However, it has to be lived with.
It can be done, too. You don’t have to become a total hypocrite to do it, either, surprisingly enough.
Do a bit of planning to break up the weekly routine into bearable segments.
Consider Monday, the main offender. What can you do on a Monday to make it more interesting? Go somewhere for lunch, go shopping for something you like, find a good book for your break, eat something really nice?
Tuesday: What about some sort of basic wander around, just window shopping or checking out something you’re trying to convince yourself you can afford?
Wednesday: Different lunch, different place to eat, different company, book yourself in for a lunch date with someone… or maybe even plan to get some extra work done so you can do something else, on Thursday or Friday.
Thursday: Get in early, finish off a lot of work you had set up from yesterday, look highly efficient, leave early.
Friday: Wednesday and Thursday cleaned out a lot of your workload. You got rid of a lot of stuff which would usually have been burying you. You’re not under as much pressure as usual, you can take it a bit easy, and drift off home, not exhausted.
Bit different from the marathon runner approach, isn’t it? The fact is that monotony isn’t anyone’s preferred way of life. It’s forced on people, by some idiot tradition which is well past its expiry date. You don’t have to put up with it, if you can figure out how to avoid it.
Another good way of making this seven day reincarnation cycle more bearable is to get the work under control. You may have to do a bit more at first, but if you can move things on fast enough, your net workload reduces.
If you usually have 20 things on hand, and they use up your day, try to have only 15, or 10, things on hand. You don’t have to push yourself so hard, and you even get time to think.
Instead of a day full of work following along behind you ready to devour every spare moment, you can create some time and space for yourself.
Then there’s the home life, which can also be made an asset. If you can do some of your work at home, do it. Be good at it, too. Make it clear you can be relied upon to do top quality work, without using up the firm’s electricity, and you could well be on a winner.
If you can’t do that, you can use a little of your time at home to get things better organized at work. Even getting up in the morning can become almost tolerable, if you just have a really good breakfast. Cars need fuel, and you need food.
Most people don’t, and are driven by their work commitments from the moment the alarm rings. The clock’s running their lives. That’s actually part of the problem. Of course you feel tired, because you are tired, and that constant movement is one of the main reasons you’re tired.
Another thing you can do at home is just have things organized before you go to work. Try and have everything you need ready to go on Friday night. It clears space during the rest of the weekend, for one thing. It also does at least part of the preparation you have to do anyway, and you can do that bit on autopilot, not as some sort of last minute trauma.
Meanwhile back at the workplace, what don’t you like about it?
What can you do to fix that, legally?
There’s usually something. A bit of décor from home, something altering the work routine, there will be something you can do to take the sting out of it.
Sometimes just looking in another direction can help. Can you move the desk/workstation around?
The routine can always be improved.
One suggestion, and this one definitely works under any conditions:
If you can, try to get in to work ahead of whoever or whatever provides your main workload, before they can interfere with getting your existing work done. That way they’re much less of a nuisance, and you can manage your work better.
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