Getting the Balance Right - Preventing & Coping With Staleness (by Alex Eames)

[wings]

• Tweet

Getting the Balance Right - Preventing & Coping With Staleness

By Alex Eames


For those who don't have English as a first language I thought it might be useful to define stale at the beginning.

Stale: having lost freshness, vigour, quick intelligence, initiative, or the like, as from overstrain, boredom, or surfeit: He had grown stale on the job and needed a long vacation. (dictionary.com)

Do you ever get stale? Do you ever find, when you've been working on a large project for a long time, that you just get fed up or bored with it? Does that ever happen to you?

Deadlines Can Help, But They Can Also Push You Over the Edge.

It's almost impossible to get stale on a job that's "for tomorrow" because you're only working on it for one day and you've got no choice. You have to get the job finished by the deadline date or bye-bye client.

But when you've been working intensely on a project for a while - burning the candle at both ends for a sustained period of time - eventually you can find yourself getting "stale". You sit down at your computer and it feels like you are two similar magnetic poles repelling each other. It's as if your computer says "not you again?" and the feeling is mutual.

You think to yourself "I want my life back". That's when you've got to sit up and take notice. You've been overdoing it! You've become stale and you need some time off.

You really need to listen to that, and take some time off. If you're a "deadline junkie" - going from one adrenaline rush to another, with a string of tight deadlines - one day you might find yourself stale. You sit at your computer and you think "I can't go on".

So how is it possible to get the balance right? To be really honest with you, I'm not quite sure. But let's explore a few possible solutions together.

1. Schedule Slots For Leisure Time (and protect them vigorously but flexibly).

Translation work can be somewhat sporadic - unless you're busy ALL the time. (That can be a good problem to have, but not always. You're more likely to get pushed into burnout if you're too busy for too long.) Is there a way that you can schedule in some leisure activities as "Immovable Objects"? Any kind of social, hobby or leisure activity that gets you away from your computer will work. Can you do that? Will it work for you? Can you say...

"Right! Every Friday I'm going to take the morning off and go and play tennis" (or whatever it is that you like to do).

Of course, you need to reserve the right to be flexible about it. If you know a job is coming in on Friday, take the time out earlier in the week. Just don't make a habit of skipping the "time out" altogether.

2. Negotiate Better Deadlines (a lot of them aren't real anyway).

"Sorry I can't fit that in as I am fully committed this morning. How about Friday early afternoon?"

OK, so you're "fully committed" going to the gym;), but they don't need to know that! Quite often, deadlines are somewhat arbitrary, and if you care to challenge them, there can be a degree of flexibility.

3. Learn to say No (and resist the call of Mammon).

If a proposed deadline doesn't offer any flexibility and threatens to rob you of your sanity...

"Just say No"

I've deliberately chosen that phrase from Nancy Reagan's campaign against drugs in the 1980s. You see, I think you can get addicted and trapped in a "continuous earning cycle", which can lead you to ignore other needs - both yours and others'. That's a dangerous place to be. Adrenaline addiction is real and there are several different types. It's not just people who jump out of planes and do crazy things. See adrenalineaddicts.org for details.

[...]

Full article at: http://alexeames.com/blog/?p=519