Imagine you’re working on an extensive and difficult project. You’re on your last stint to finally wrap things up. Ready to hit the deadline in a last ditch effort. The next project is already calling for your attention tomorrow.
As concentration fades and you feel miserable trying to finish, every little piece takes longer and longer. You’re mentally drained and just done for the day. Ignoring the desperate need for rest you continue on and somehow wail your way through it. That’s real hardship and dedication. Exactly what they told us at school, uni and our first real job. Put your head down and keep grinding until you’re actually finished.
I get it, sometimes you just have to grind it out. Man up! Hustle mindset, bro!
Turns out that’s a stupid move more often than not.
The day after
So you’ve worked deep into the night to finish “the job”, got an unrecognizable semblance of what we can call deep restful sleep and somehow managed to get out of your comfy bed the very next morning. Ready for more impactful work.
To give you the benefit of doubt, the work you did on your nightshift was actually good and done in a timely and efficient fashion. Takes a load of imagination, but we’ll work with it, so stay with me. Imagine you only drained your energy levels.
Great, now what? Another 9 to 5 where you’re already mentally checked out by lunch. Say hello to more wasted time and missed opportunities. Another day down the drain because you love had to burn the candle from both sides.
Instead of one day of not achieving your target, you’re now at two. Unfortunately that’s a form of momentum too. Upon closer inspection, it turns out yesterday’s work sucks and needs to be redone. Today’s work is … what did you actually do? Well, let’s say you achieved “something”. Lunch was a formidable and delicious success!
Back to the drawing board.
But I have deadlines!
Don’t we all? I hope your deadlines aren’t decided on a whim and you have agency, some form of influence in how everything pans out through a project’s timeline.
The reasons for overtime were established long before you actually lit the second side of the candle. Weeks or months of either procrastination, bad planning, miscalculations or decisions based on faulty data points. Worst case, all of them to some degree.
There were a plethora of points of no return. Actions leading to you sitting in the dark of night, blindingly illuminated by blue rays of death, robbing you of your well earned sleep, time with your spouse, kids or any other joy. Even activities like blindingly illuminating yourself with blue rays of death in a game of “[insert popular videogame of choice]”, robbing you of your well earned sleep. Gotcha!
You can’t fix in one night what weeks and months have caused to pile up. Sometimes you can try, but probably not with quality work and certainly not for long until something … someone breaks.
Work smarter. Recognize when it starts, take control and work on solutions.