Working Past Exhaustion: A Recipe For Mistakes

Oh, the frustrations of long, long days!

I generally work normal work hours. Sure, at times I’m on my computer on weekends or after hours. But I’d be doing that anyways.

However, I’m taking an evening class right now. The class meets one night a week, so that demand isn’t that much. But after an 8+ hour day, a 3 hour class can get wearying. And the class is mostly sitting in front of a screen, which is what I tend to spend all day doing.

Tonight, by 8:45, I was pretty much toast. I hadn’t noticed it until I saw several dumb mistakes. And those mistakes caused me the aggravation of redoing about a 1/2 hour’s worth of work. Fortunately, it took less time to re-do than to do originally. But that means extra work, needless extra work.

I was clever enough, though, to see that and, after fixing the mistakes I’d made (at least I’m pretty sure I fixed them), I opted to stop.

At times, when effectiveness hits the floor…and punches right on through, any effort at all will be counter-productive. That’s a hard lesson to learn, internalize, and keep in mind regularly. I, too, suffer from the mindset that “if I only worked harder/more/whatever…”.

I know that sometimes the only way to be effective is to stop and rest, get my head back together and then restart.

It’s just living it that’s the challenge.

Fitbit Fun

Last night my Fitbit Blaze‘s charge dropped super low. This has rarely been a problem, but sometimes it makes things quirky when I first turn it on after the recharge. So, when I pulled it out of the charger this morning and the time was off by 3 some odd hours I didn’t think about it. Once I got in the car, I opened the app, pulled down to sync, and then proceeded to forget about it. Well, that didn’t work and the thing just didn’t sync.

Later, amongst other things I tried:

  • Restarted the Fitbit
  • Restart Bluetooth on my S7
  • Disconnect and attempt to re-pair the fitbit with the mobile app

Nothing worked. Then I had the idea I should’ve had far, far earlier: reboot the phone. And that’s what solved the problem.

Lesson: sometimes having deep understanding of systems can get in the way. Don’t overlook the easy answers early on. It’s far too easy to get hung up on the complex, deeper down solutions that you forget the simple/basic solves.

Duh!

Have you ever over-complexified a solution? What did you learn?