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.