When you start out in your working life, it's hard enough just to get through the days. Watching my son Callum and other people who come to work with us, who haven't worked before or at the early stages of their working life. You turn up on Monday, see what needs to be done, and do it until Friday, then you have the weekend. Sometimes, you get some nice things during the week, and sometimes you have some time off.
As you become more established, your work becomes more complicated and one of the things you try to do at times, (particularly if you have the privilege of setting your own schedule), is to ‘get ahead of yourself’. Maybe you've got something to do first thing in the morning—a doctor's appointment, taking the kids to school—so maybe you work in the evening. To steal 2 hours off the next day so you can do something else.
Classic time for me to do this stealing thing is on a Sunday. I always get the urge to ‘get ahead of myself’ on a Sunday, and often I've scheduled to do something on a Monday morning, which is not related to work, like ride my bike, and so then, I want to dive into stuff on a Monday afternoon or early evening and catapult myself forward into the week. This is all fine, isn't it? Until you find yourself constantly and exhaustingly, always trying to get ahead of yourself.
This is, in fact, a false economy. If you work a ‘normal’ person's work, then the first part of Monday should be to get ready for the week, and the last part of Friday should be to close it down. If you're really clever, by the last part of Friday, you should be really ready for the next week, and then you can go off and have a weekend and not think about anything else because you're already ready. It's not quite how it works when you own your own business, and not quite how it works when you have the mind of an entrepreneur. But actually, you need to be aware of this. Otherwise, you find yourself every night trying to get ahead of yourself, and every Saturday and every Sunday. And then all of a sudden, if you're not careful, you've got a ‘Sunday night feeling’.
Sunday night feeling is the test for how much you love or hate your job. People who don't hate their job don't get Sunday night feeling; people who do get it. Some people get Sunday night feeling on a Saturday morning, other people get Sunday night feeling every single night of the week, including Sunday.
Blog Post Number - 4345
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