In yesterday’s post, I bemoaned how difficult it is for me to avoid working on days I’m supposed to be on vacation. I thought I’d reflect on this first day of vacation and tell you how I did…
I didn’t avoid work completely, putting in about two hours total over various sessions from a few minutes to maybe 30 minutes in length. That isn’t too bad, but it’s still more than I hoped to do. Part of the issue was the need to redo an expense report that I didn’t complete correctly last week due to new procedures in place I hadn’t used before. When the report was rejected today, I figured I needed to do it over and resubmit since I was at the time limit for submitting it. I also spent a few minutes here and there deleting emails or dealing with very quick ones I could knock off. A few other random matters took a little time, but not too much.
The pressure came when every instinct in me wanted to grab my work laptop and dive in to something that would suck me into some black hole of more time that I should spend working today. I successfully avoided that temptation, I’m glad to say. In fact, I started the day with a task list of a number of things to do, none of which were work-related, and I returned to that throughout the day to guide how I spent my time. The second item on the list was spending five hours reading, so that fortunately took a major chunk of the day. I’m still working on the list and may not complete it, but I put a serious dent in it. I’ll add the undone items to tomorrow’s already long list.
Tomorrow won’t be much different since it is the one day this week I actually must go to work for a meeting, but I have a host of other things that must also get accomplished, so I’ll try to keep the work hours to 2-3 for the day. That isn’t ideal, but there’s no way around it tomorrow.
Overall, I did better today than I normally have in the past, but I still have a way to go to be able to walk away from work on my days off as I should.
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