Friday Night Lights

For someone who overshares as much as I do on Blogger, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, I am actually pretty cagey about my work life.  As a consultant, I am loath to tip my hand on how much I'm juggling because I want each client to feel they are my number one priority.  But, I will fess up and say...I am very busy with work gigs right now.

I still won't say how many.  (Sorry to each client: I can share that it's more than you.)   But it's enough that my work days consist of two things.  First, there are scheduled things like working meetings, client meetings, and networking events.  Second, there is unscheduled time, of which exactly 100 percent is devoted to doing analyses, generating narrative, and producing reports. 

I say "exactly 100 percent" because I am very disciplined when it comes to doing client work.  I take my work product, my deadlines, and my overall commitment to my clients very seriously.  So when I am on deadline, I do not distract myself with anything but rather am completely and utterly focused on the task at hand.  That means no checking personal email, no Facebook or other social media time-wasters, and not even keeping an eye on incoming work email. 

Which means that very often I get to Friday night, after a long week of work and a frantic rush home to feed the kids dinner and get them off to bed, and have an enormous number of work emails to catch up on.  And let me tell you, having work emails hanging over my head that I haven't had time to respond to, heck haven't even had time to determine whether they are in need of immediate action or not, that is stressful for me.

So Friday night, hunched over my work laptop in the comfort of my home office, is a great destresser.  The work week is over and I can systematically whittle my in-box down, get my week ahead organized, and otherwise climb back above water. 

Banging out emails and making work plans for multiple hours on a Friday night might not seem very appealing to most.  But my social psyche is such that I don't require going out and partying til the wee hours.  What I do need to stay sane is to stay on top of everything that is flying at me through my inbox.  And so after an entire week of slowly going insane, regaining my sanity on Friday night has become an oasis for me.