#TeamNoSleep is #TeamCrammedWork
I’ve clocked in twelve hours of sleep so far this week. Yes, that’s the total for the past five days. It’s not an alarming number for an anxious insomniac like myself (yay #TeamNoSleep), but it is when I glance at my bed and see that my sheets are still neatly made. I haven’t even laid down enough to mess them up!
Now, I don’t want to be that person — the one that’s proud of her sleeplessness because it makes people think that she didn’t catch some zzzz’s because she was hard at work doing something reaaaaally important. I’m not that person (and if you’ve read my last post, you know that I’m not that person (at least not anymore)). This week, I’m just the person who desperately needed the down time but had to give it up.
See, that’s what made these twelve hours different from what I usually got. I didn’t have a choice. I had a dozen things I needed to get done for work this week and forty hours just didn’t cut it. Normally my reasons for not sleeping are more balanced: I spent two hours reading, three playing games, an hour for Netflix, fifteen minutes for stretching, etc. This happens way too often that I don’t even brag about it as much (and yes, when it comes to this type of sleeplessness, I am that person), but losing sleep for work?? That’s one medal I don’t want around my neck.
It’s not that I was not hard-working. It’s also not definite that, at least for the case of this week, I was. The fact that I even have to state this means that it’s still a prevalent school of thought that sleeplessness = hard work. No. It’s crammed work.
What those twelve hours meant was that I did not pace myself, that I didn’t plan well enough, that I bit off more than I can chew, and that I pushed my body farther than where it can naturally go. Why would I take pride in that? In my failure to do quality focused work? (I have to include quality and focused because lack of sleep can affect the integrity of my output and how I was able to churn it out.)
I am happy and proud when I say that I spent four straight hours focusing on writing specs for a feature, be it from 4PM to 8PM or 2AM-6AM, ahead of a deadline. What I am NOT happy about is having to extend forty hours of being awake to forty-eight because I have to send in edits the next day.
Rush work and surprise deadlines are unavoidable. I completely understand. Task lists at work are designed precisely to accommodate these: not all your tasks should be urgent. I took a look at mine this past week and almost all of them had to be done this week — and chunk of that was my fault because I allowed them to be carried over from the week before. Even worse, there were a couple of items on that list that shouldn’t have been there in the first place if I didn’t commit dates to people who didn’t even need the output that soon — again, my fault.
I guess, moving forward, the lessons to learn here are 1) to always always balance the things on my plate between urgent and non-urgent tasks so I can move the non-urgent ones around when I need to; and 2) to not commit outputs based on the assumption that my schedule and pace will not change. I must keep assuming the worst case scenario: that there will be unexpected tasks to be done and they will definitely be crammed.
Crammed work doesn’t have to mean crap work. Sometimes crammed work can be good work: remember how those deadlines in college motivated you to write faster and better? Crammed work also doesn’t have to mean pulling an all-nighter. There should be something that can be postponed to make time for cramming. I should start learning to expect crammed work.
I’d like to think — no, scratch that — I know that I am capable of delivering my best without having to sacrifice a little shut eye. So why do I feel like I had to give a little extra this past couple of days? Maybe this week was a special case that required too much hustle. Or maybe it really was a result of poor pacing and foresight. In any case, I’m gonna start expecting crammed work to creep up on me every now and then. And if that still means that I’m a permanent member of #TeamNoSleep, then I gotta stock up on coffee and energy bars.
