I've discovered a new way of coping with the stresses of work. They call it a "
weekend".
This may sound strange - as most people probably already knew this, but I didn't. See, I work in multimedia design and development - a job that is driven by technology and constantly pushing it to do stuff that hasn't been done before. With this type of job, there inherently comes stress from many angles. "Am I doing this correctly, but also in a new and better way?", "Am I going to hit this ridiculous deadline?", "What if the client hates this design - and all of my time and effort is for nothing?", and the big one "Will this work for everyone - on every machine - all the time?"
So, during the week my stress levels go out of control. Long days turn into late nights. Even on nights that I go home on time, I worry about what I need to do to stay afloat the next day. And I'm not alone in this. It's common among everyone in my industry - and the average time spent doing my job tends to be somewhere in the 7 to 10 year range. After that, most people either start working for themselves, get promoted to management, or drop out of the industry to work doing something else. It just seems to be a fact of life that people don't spend their entire life coding and designing. Something less stressful eventually wears on them and they move towards that career, abandoning the daily technology overdose, pushy salesmen, overzealous clients, and the whole racket.
Until that happens for me, I have discovered the joy of a weekend. Two whole days without work. For the last two weeks, even though I felt like I should have been working on projects, I avoided them. I "shunned" them. It took me a while, and even this last weekend I had to check my email - just to feel connected - just to be sure. But here it is Monday, and I'm no more overloaded than I would be if I had spent all weekend trying to "catch up". If anything, I feel more relaxed about the overload. I spent time at my home, with friends and family, and fishing with my dad - something I haven't done for a long time it seems. It was relaxing! After a while, I just quit thinking about everything, and just started thinking about how it was that I was going to get that fish to bite my lure. I started trying to calculate where the fish were - asking my dad if he thought that they were on the sunny side of the cover or the shady side...Trying to figure out how to catch a fish. "90% of the fish are in 10% of the water" he'd say.
I didn't catch anything that day, but I can sit here now and think about how good the sun felt, how the fresh air smelled, and how fun it was to sit there and catch absolutely nothing!
That's what a weekend is
supposed to be like - and I've decided that in order for me to make it until I finally move up and out of the trenches of development, I'm going to do all I can to make the most of my two day vacations.
