The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (55)

The creep into Sunday

A little while ago, I changed my working week so that I am 'admin' on a Monday morning.

On a Monday, I can exercise first thing, and then I can stay at home and go into the shed in the garden and 'set up the week', whatever that means.

In my mind, at that time, it was just going to be the preparations, checking all the emails, making sure they were done, logs at least considered and set for the week, meetings looked at and understood, clinical tasks understood and just everything sorted and settled before I went to work, to see patients at two o'clock in the afternoon.

Then, Monday morning started to creep backwards again into Sunday evening. Then, I began to want to get things ready on a Sunday evening for Monday morning, even though Monday morning was supposed to be the session for getting things ready for the rest of the week.

And so things crept backwards so that I would do some work on a Sunday afternoon or evening just for an hour so that I was ready for Monday morning and the time would be more effective.

And then I started to get anxious if I didn't get the work done on a Sunday, or I would be looking for lunchtime on a Sunday to see whether I could get it done and where it would go or whether I could sneak it in without Alison looking because she would inevitably ask "why are you working on a Sunday when you can do that tomorrow?".

I don't want the Sunday night feeling to be a thing in my life.

It has not been like that for so many years, but interestingly, the tide started to come in, and I started to feel it again.

I don't work clinically on Fridays generally, and I don't have a lot of Friday teaching commitments that take me to five o'clock (a few, but not so many), so the Sunday night system now will be on the Friday afternoon so that the Sunday night is free.

I'm also changing my working life again so that I'm entirely non-clinical on a Monday, but even still, I will not be preparing on a Sunday night.

It's essential, absolutely critical, that most of us have time away from work (there are a few souls who can manage just to grind it through, and I greatly admire them, but that's not the life I want to live).

Understanding when it starts to get in there and impact your life in a way that you don't want is the time when you sit back and change things.

We don't have to just continue to work and work on a hamster wheel.

We have the ability to change our patterns and to put different things in place to make it better.

So, now the Sunday night will be a Friday afternoon, and the Monday morning will be the Monday morning, and I will have the Sunday back again.