The 90+ hour work week

As a kind of follow on to the last blog entry about being passionate about your work I thought that I would talk about the other side of loving what you do. The inability to step away from it.

Now don’t get me wrong (insert song into head now) I don’t do this every week, nor would I be able to. But now and then I find that I do it.

The week before last I worked a 7 day week, I worked from Saturday through to the following Saturday for around 12-16 hours a day depending on how awake I was feeling on that particular day.

In that week we had to:

• Travel to London for a meeting with a new client
• Write a big proposal for said customer.
• Finish one of our clients websites (which included a blog and an online shop)
• Start and finish a blog design for another company
• Do a logo design for another client
• A complete visual look and feel for a new client
• Various blogs including one for Sage UK

On top of our list we still had the usual phone calls, general correspondence and anything else the working week usually throws at us. On reflection, saying yes to it all and actually getting on with it and finishing it all off was going to take its toll and it did. On the second Sunday I crashed out all day and watched a lot of awful films, chilled out and slept like a baby, what I didn’t count on was that mentally I had worn myself out so much that by Monday morning I was good for nothing and my productivity hit an all time low.

I guess the thing to consider is that if you are going to do crazy hour weeks you need to have the balance and not expect to be able to keep it up for very long.

Hopefully it will be a while before I have to do a week like that again, I had fun but it’s important to have down time.