Long days at work

Just wanted to write a quick post on what I’ve been attempting to accomplish recently.

We’ve been working on a big proposal at work recently. We’ve been working toward the proposal for a year and a half now or so.. Work activities have been aimed at positioning ourselves in a good spot for writing the proposal and stuff like that.

Proposal deadline was the end of September, and it was decreed back in the spring that we should plan on being around the office for most of July, and all of august and September. So, vacations had to be done before that. And, that’s about how it worked out. Starting in July, meetings really started to pick up. Daily meetings, for 2 or 3 hours, for a good part of July. Writing started in early August, and sometime in August was probably the last time that I actually had a 24 hour period where I wasn’t at work.

Work kept intensifying. From august until now, there have been about 550 emails sent back and forth regarding the proposal, and about 250 of them were in the last week alone.

So, anyway, the days at work got longer and longer. Non-work activities started to suffer. A draft version of the proposal was due last Monday, and the preceding weekend took a fair amount of time. This past week, however, was day after day of nothing but work (it seemed). For most of September I have been trying to exercise before going into work of a morning, because the evenings have all been spent at work. This past week was rough, though. As I started leaving work later and later each evening, it really started getting hard to be up at 6:30 to exercise so that I could be back into work at a good time. Wednesday night I think I came home about 11, and, between Thursday morning and yesterday, Monday, I managed to get 14 hours of sleep. Thursday night I actually made it home at 11:30, but got some disturbing mail that kept me awake until about 1am or so. Managed to get up at 6:30 on Friday. Friday night I was at work until 1am. Saturday morning I got up around 6:30-6:45 squeezed in some exercise, went to work, and left from work around 4am on Sunday. Woke up about 7:30 and got into work at about 9:45 Sunday morning, and didn’t leave until 5pm MONDAY. I did leave the building once, at 6am Monday, so that I could move my truck from one parking spot to another. It was kind of cool at that time.

The proposal was effectively done at 8am on Monday. But, I didn’t want to go to bed then. I wanted to get back into a normal wake/sleep pattern as quickly as I could, so I figured I would stay awake as long as I could and then fall asleep, and hopefully be back to normal by Tuesday. As the afternoon rolled on, I started getting tired. I was, I think, rather coherent for most of the day. It really shocked me. I ended up being awake for 34 hours before falling asleep, and, other than having tired eyes, I really think I did OK. Anyway, I left work about 5pm, and promptly crashed my truck into the first car I met. Just kidding! No, actually, I made it home fine and figured that I would start the process of falling asleep. So, I laid down on the couch and started watching some TV. About 10 minutes later I was nodding off, so I went and laid down in bed. I decided to send some email, and went back to bed and promptly feel asleep. This was a little before 6pm. And, I slept until 6:30am. Close to 13 hours of sleep. I woke up feeling quite refreshed.. The most awake I’ve felt upon hopping out of bed in quite a while.

Anyway, this has been an interesting experience. I’ll end this session by saying that my brother bought me one of those Successory desk pieces a few years ago while I was in grad school. It reads:

EFFORT

Some people dream of worthy accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them.

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