Work Schedule: Pros and Cons
(translated by AI + it claimed I am a very funny and very unstructured author!)
I am terribly, horribly lazy about writing a longread today. I can’t even pick a topic — everything somehow feels insignificant.
There are days when working is simply, completely impossible. By now I’ve mostly learned to let it go and say, “Everyone else has a Thursday, but I’ve got a Saturday.” Sometimes I have as many as three Saturdays a week.
What’s much harder is convincing my family that today it’s the other way around: today I have a Thursday, and my hands and brain are itching to work, no matter what. Well, convincing them is one thing — that can be done. But what about my conscience?
So I end up adding a fourth Saturday and diligently doing nothing, suppressing my inner workaholic.
On the one hand, it’s wonderful to follow your own rhythms, never force yourself through anything, and simply juggle your tasks so that whichever one you’re doing is exactly the one you feel like doing right now.
On the other hand, I have to admit that schedules aren’t just some biorythmic weapon aimed at people with ADHD, diagnosed or otherwise, and every other variety of lovable scatterbrain. There is, in fact, something to be said for having a routine.
Children don’t end up bouncing around a moonlit playground at midnight, museums stay open until at least lunchtime instead of closing right after breakfast, and somehow life with a schedule feels just a little cozier and better put together.
I’ve literally just built myself a set of wonderfully simple work routines, and my plans have stopped looking like the molecules of something like vancomycin, somehow looping back into themselves on page three of my notebook and demanding to be rewritten from scratch. They’ve shrunk down to a handful of straightforward daily tasks, one of which is this very one: writing a long post about my working life.
Sure, I could skip Monday. There’s no guy with a club standing over me. Besides, I’ve already been a good girl today — I was a full-time mum and I got some work done.
So really, I could leave this text until tomorrow. Tomorrow my husband is taking our daughter for the whole day, which means it’s officially a workday for me and I get to, as we call it in our family, “have fun.”
But if I let myself skip writing today, everything will start sliding apart.
So here you are: a somewhat forced piece of writing, but one that comes straight from the heart.
It didn’t turn out very long, and it’s structured rather terribly, but I get to tick the box and spend the rest of the week scratching my belly. I could have used this space to properly and usefully promote our perfect collaboration with Ilya Kolmanovsky — because it really is going to be wonderful! Just imagine: Kolmanovsky gives a summer lecture about ten remarkable animals, and then the children and I illustrate it together. All for €20 — exactly what Maya and I spent today on our modest lunch at the Saulkrasti library.
But no. Instead I chose to write some entirely different nonsense, because going against logic and doing what I feel like doing instead of what the gods of marketing would approve of is something I value far too much. The classic “I’ll freeze my ears off just to spite my mother.” Oh well. What can you do?
