Obsessive Compulsive Escapism

A friend told me last week that I was running at 110 percent. What dictates how much 100 percent actually IS, and therefore if I am exceeding it though, is subject to personal experience and opinion. For him (and I suppose many others, but not in my industry) – 100 percent is a 40 hour week. It’s a long lunch on a Friday. Its leaving the office at least once per day, for lunch, a coffee, a trip to the bank. For him, there is no weekend work, and staying late occurs a few times per month.
So therein, does that make him lazy, or me overworked? Am I battling with an inability to manage my time, or an unrealistic workload. Does he have it easy, or is he working his ass off within that locked timeframe of 40 hours?
What makes a job easy is speculative and relative. At 6pm every night, not a soul in the firm has left the office – it is de rigueur in the profession to work late. And on my many jaunts up to the 10th floor on a Sunday to catch up or get ahead for the week, the floor is littered with people working away silently.

I speculate if one actually has the capacity to operate at 110 percent, for 100 percent of the time? This week I was faced with ‘down time’ at the office, and with nothing inherently urgent, I found myself take the extreme response and withdraw completely. Why I do this, I do not know, but I know that I DO engage in this lax and negative behaviour on a cyclic basis. There are always, always things needing to be done, but when faced with an opportunity to ‘drop the pressure’, I vacate. Mentally ‘check out’.

It is this psychological response, an aversion to any work whatsoever when not under strain, that makes me think that I am a workaholic. Surely not! Especially when I have neglected to complete at least one task in three days this week! I believe I have an intrinsic shut down mechanism, a ‘switch’ that picks a time when Im not operating a workload of ‘critical mass’, and numbs my brain, preventing me from engaging in anything further. Oh just THINK of the work I could achieve if I could disable that mechanism. And boom – there it is - A desire to disable the very thing that stops me from have a debilitating and probably very public nervous breakdown. THAT, my dear reader, makes me a workaholic.

In a world of high achievers, global desire, and a ladder begging to be climbed, there seems to be no aversion in my psyche to tipping the scales of work-life balance – and that is fairly fucked up.