If you follow me on social media, you no doubt saw me posting a kind of funny meme about a workaholic. It actually shows a guy in heavy plate armor, and I suppose this is from some video game setting, as some people have pointed out. The caption of it is the part that we're really interested in, and it shows him with his head in his arms saying “workaholics when they run out of workahol”.
And, you know, the point there is, of course, humorous. There is no such thing as workahol, but we could think of that as something like a disposition, some part of ourselves that maybe we started out with not by genetics or anything like that, but definitely from our environment.
I certainly saw my father and my mother working quite hard, although they both knew how to enjoy themselves and take time off as well. And I saw this from childhood onward. I also grew up in a time when being productive and devoting yourself to things was often praised and rewarded. And I also realized that if you do want to get big projects done, you have to, as the expression goes, strike while the iron is hot. Oftentimes that means striking while you have the energy to do something.
So am I a workaholic? Well, by some estimates, I certainly could be considered to be so. But I also like to think that as time has gone on and I've slowed down a bit, as has my wife, who's around the same age as me, we're both in our 50s, as energy levels decline inevitably, as illnesses happen, I've learned how to back off a bit.
More importantly than that, the part that I think so many people find very challenging, it's not just about reducing your workload or deferring timelines and deadlines. It's about your mindset. You have to learn how to eventually become okay with things that you intended to do, that you may have even planned or committed to do, quite publicly, not getting done on the timeline that you want them done, and perhaps in some cases, not at all.
One prime example of that, and this was admittedly based in a bit of, I'm not even going to call it wishful thinking, because I don't know what I was thinking when I said that this would happen. The Half-Hour Hegel project that a lot of people know me for, it's a series of what ended up being 376 half-hour videos going through all of Hegel's Phenomenology, and it's been a useful thing for many people.
Somehow, I believed when I first started the project that it would only take me, you know, two, maybe three or four years to do. And I suppose if I'd kept at it assiduously and never took any time off and cranked out eight videos a month, maybe that could have happened. But as it turned out, you know, lots of things happen, illnesses, other projects, things that I needed to do with my wife or kids, the death of dogs and cats, and all of those sorts of matters. And so even when I was getting my quota of six videos done per month, which wasn't every single month, it ended up taking me nine years to see the entire project through. In that case, I can say I did in fact finish it up.
But there have been many cases where something just got stalled and I didn't finish the project that I had intended, or where I said I was going to do something and just never got around to it. A lot of the books that I have sitting, waiting to be reviewed in my Dr. Sadler's Honest Reviews series are like that. They date back to 2018, 2019, and And I've read them and I just haven't gotten around to creating the videos.
Now, how should we view that sort of thing? Do you beat yourself up about it and get down upon yourself and say, what a loser I am. I should have gotten this accomplished. Certainly that can be a motivator early on when you're not getting things done. But after you've had quite a few of these opposite of successes, which you can call failures if you want to — I would actually say running up on the shoals of life — after you've had enough of them, you come to realize that it's not sustainable to get on your own case and get down on yourself for each of these things that you didn't actually pull off. That you need to be a bit more forgiving while at the same time not forgiving, cutting yourself so much slack that you don't end up accomplishing things and you live, so to speak, just in a dream world where you daydream about what you might have accomplished.
So why is this on my mind? Well, for the last, now I would say three weeks or so, I have been dealing with a number of different symptoms. And so has my wife, some of which could be attributed to a flu, you know, sinus issues, headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, sometimes chills.
Eventually, we got to the point where we said, well, I think we're going to have to go in and see a doctor. So we drove in together to urgent care only to get checked out and then hear the verdict. Well, there's not much we can do for you. There's a lot of viruses going around. This doesn't appear to be bacterial, so no antibiotics would be helpful. We don't know what you've actually got, but clearly you can get some work done. So you can't be that badly off. Get some more rest. Make sure you stay very hydrated. Take some painkillers over the counter and eventually you'll be right as rain
So now i'm starting to feel better, but for you know about three weeks what I was finding is that I would get fatigued fairly quickly. So by around three or four o'clock in the afternoon I couldn't get much of anything done. I would come home, take a nap, get up, have some dinner, think that I was going to do some work that night, be too tiredm and either go to bed early or take a bath and go to bed and start again the next day. In the morning, I would not be feeling great, but I could be productive.And then my productivity level would decline as the day went on.
And I found myself getting further and further behind, which if you've experienced that, it can be quite frustrating, especially when you know that people are expecting things from you, perhaps even depending on you to get things done. That's the case if you're teaching. That's the case if you've got important projects going on. That's the case when you've made commitments to clients and colleagues that certain things were going to happen.
So it requires a kind of mental shift. And I'm fortunate in that I have a partner in Andi, my wife, who is similarly driven, but also has similar challenges and who can say to me, hey you've done enough for the day. Your productivity shouldn't come before your health or whatever else it's going to be. Take it easy. Because I know that she won't tell me to take it easy too often. And I do the same for her. So this is a form of mutual support, you could say.
But what ends up happening is that some things have to be put on hold. And prioritization becomes very important. One of the temptations that I tend to face is sticking with things that are easier and more attractive to me as projects and deferring the things that I really should do, but I'd prefer not to. When I run out of energy, then those things go onto the back burner. They wind up on the to-do list for the next day. And that's not a good thing because eventually your to-do list gets longer and longer and it has a higher proportion of the things that you weren't really that happy to do, at least at the time, which then can affect your mood as well.
Sometimes the answer to that is just to wipe the slate clean altogether. Other times, maybe you have to do the, as one of my colleagues and friends calls it, eat your broccoli first and then you get your steak and dessert. I actually like broccoli, so that metaphor doesn't work for me as well, but apparently he's not so interested in vegetables, but really does like steak and dessert. So you rearrange your schedule so that you're getting to the tasks that you didn't originally want to do.
Now, I'm not offering some sort of here's the program to make sense out of your life and rearrange everything to your benefit here in this podcast. I'm more setting out an experience, and a problem, and hints of a solution that I'm reflecting upon here as I tell you about the this. But I think this is actually something that can be quite helpful for a lot of people, and here's where I'll end this.
A lot of people look at what I'm doing from the outside, and they say wow you're so productive. You get so much done. How do you do it? And my answer is two parts. Ine of them is I don't have a system as such, but I do have a number of habits that I've built up over the years that are helpful for me. I'm pretty good at prioritizing and also at making myself do things that I don't particularly want to do at the moment.
But the other part of it is from the outside, it looks like I'm very productive, like I manage my time extraordinarily well and get a lot done. But that is an outside view and it isn't the complete reality of what is happening on the inside. My house, if we want to use this as a sort of metaphor is just as messy and cluttered as is yours. You're just not seeing it because my yard looks very clean and orderly, and there's a lot of things in it waiting for other people to come and take, but if you were to step inside you might be a little bit surprised. Now, not a hoarder situation, not super gross or messy, but certainly not what you would necessarily expect. And I think saying that might be helpful for some people to hear.
I think I'll probably talk about this elsewhere because there's a lot to be said. But the most we can do is trying our best. And at some points in our life, our best isn't going to be the same best as it was in an earlier time. Now that may change as well. Sometimes things are cumulative. So our best could be even better than it was before.
But part of the process of aging, and right now I'm solidly in middle age, is to begin to recognize where you have to accept limitations. So I will end with that, and I look forward to seeing what people have to say about that.
Share this post