What’s in a Weekend?
During this time, I find that weekend are pretty crazy concepts right now. The weekend usually meant not having to go to work, being around the house and working on house things or landscaping around the outside. Trouble is that right now I’m around the house all the time. And I worked outside when the weather was good. And while my wife and I would normally thinking getting to spend time together was special because our work schedules often conflicted and resulted in seeing little of each other, and things like making dinner together and sitting down to eat it would be rare things (like unicorns), we’ve done it every night. Heck, we’ve even had movie night several nights this week.
I think it’s important to keep our work and personal lives separate. And its important to take breaks from work. It’s tempting to work constantly, and it can happen really easily if you really like your work, or you don’t structure yourself effectively. Its especially difficult with those of us that do not have 9-5 jobs and there’s a need and an expectation that sometimes work has to come home. Some of us ride a roller coaster too, with times of higher volume of work and times of lower.
My jobs are like this. Technically I work a 35 hour a week church music job, and a 20-30 hour a week music education job. For the church job, I do ride the roller coaster….sometimes around the high holidays like Christmas and Easter, I end up working 40-50 hour weeks, and then there’s the planning phase for these, which usually results in higher weeks leading up to the holidays. But then there are weeks in the summer where I might only work 15 hours. The teaching job goes up and down too, around concerts and tests etc. And of course we have the summer off. But even with the insane hours, I get a tremendous amount of autonomy, and the ability to create my own schedule. I sometime prefer to work very late because I’m a bit of a nightowl, and I can do that. They call it a task-oriented contract.
Over the years, I’ve found that my level of exhaustion and mental health, has required me to be more structured with my work. I carefully monitor the time that I work and the time that I don’t, and I set specific tasks to complete and then complete them. It battles my perfectionist nature of wanting things to all be done, in jobs where things are never completely done.
In this time that I am at home, the schedule has been my salvation in even more wonderful ways. Because all the work is being done here, and to avoid getting locked up and feeling like I’m just on 24 hour call, I’ve relied even more heavily on the schedule and structure. It’s a way to keep working (which I am grateful to be able to do as I watch so many others getting furloughed or having their work cancelled all together because of this damn virus), while not going crazy.
May you all have the opportunity to keep working, and to not go stir crazy at home. Reread my silver lining post, often if you want (I sure do), and remember that this situation will end eventually. Eventually this virus will go away, and we’ll be able to get back to whatever semblance of normalcy in our lives we can find again. Its a matter of time, not a matter of if.