I took last Friday off to give myself a nice, long weekend where I wouldn’t have to think about work, client work, or anything except enjoying myself. Holy crap did that backfire. I didn’t get to sleep last this morning until about 4:30. Why? I had repressed and conciously decided against thinking or doing anything that wasn’t related to relaxation. When I went to bed last night and started my post-weekend work checklist in my head regarding the location of my laptop, keys, wallet, etc. Everything that I repressed the whole weekend came flooding back into my head and I couldn’t sleep.
I can’t remember the last time that I took time off and purposely didn’t think about productivity of the non-restful kind. After last night it will probably be another long while before I do it again.
I tried all the tricks; reminding myself that I can’t do anything about it until the morning, reading, watching boring TV, warm milk, a shot of vodka (last ditch effort around 1:30).
So what have I learned?
If you’re passionate about building, executing, or maintaining something you shouldn’t keep yourself from thinking about it. I succeeded at not actually working over my four day weekend (except for Friday where I finished a client proposal) and that would have been fine as long as I had continued thinking and taking random notes instead of distracting myself with card and computer games or movies.
Regardless of my lack of sleep, I don’t regret not doing anything ‘productive’ over the weekend, I just wish I had more than 3 hours of sleep prior to going back to work.
