I don’t necessarily think I’m a workaholic as it relates to my teaching career, but I’m always working on side projects, or working over my holidays. I haven’t been on a trip further than 250km in about 2 years. Everyone says I work too hard (even though I still don’t get job interviews in my home town…and people who have no work experience seem to trump me in that dept…but thats another story).
I am feeling the urge to hit the plane and get as far away from all the bills, work, and things I have earned as soon as possible. It’s time to rejuvinate.
Are you a workaholic? How do you define it? What are you doing about it?
It’s Sunday night. I am about to prepare my work for tomorrow, because I won’t have time when I get to the office. I will be swamped with everything else that will have come up while I wasn’t there on the weekend.
I check my emails on annual leave. I stay late and don’t put it on my timesheet. I think about work all the time, and I dream about it most nights. I talk about it constantly if my friends let me.
I have turned in to one of those people I hate! Arrrgh! What to do?
Well, I need to remind myself that I didn’t use to be like this, it’s a recent thing. I used to leave at 5pm and switch off. I never logged in at home. I existed. But that was before I got promoted, and before I went back to college part-time as well as working full-time.
So, I have booked some overnight trips to the seaside in the coming months, I have joined a gym, I have started cycling to work to give me head space, I have booked annual leave for when I have essays or exams due, I have planned other fun stuff including a WHOLE WEEK OFF in September and I will even save up and go abroad when that comes around! I will ignore my boss when she stays late and I don’t. I will not go further down this path.
Except for tonight. Tonight I will finish the work I need to do before tomorrow.
Many people seem to think I’m a workaholic as I typically spend about 60 hours per week in the office. But mostly, I think I just like the extra money since I’m paid by the hour and 40 hours of overtime every 2 weeks makes a pretty big difference on my paycheck.
However, I really do love my job and look forward to going in every morning when I wake up. I was actually forced to take some time off this week since my PTO was maxed out and I was going to start losing vacation pay if I didn’t use it. On one hand, it will be nice to spend time this week with friends and family and just getting stuff done around the house. But in a way, I’m almost disappointed I’m not going to be able to go to work.
It depends. My girlfriend and our friends wives and SOs used to call themselves “consulting widows”. Basically because as management consultants we used to travel all the time, work long hours and be on call constantly. I used to be somewhat of a workaholic at my last firm. Not as bad as some people though. Some people litterally had no lives. They put their job ahead of everything else in their lives. My GF and I had to babysit a fellow director’s wife at our bosses weding because he was off Blackberrying for hours. I’m like “dude! who are you calling? Everyone we work with is here!”
My current regular corporate job, I can’t be bothered though. There’s no upward mobility and it seems like whether you stay or get fired is purely arbitrary. And no one seems to care what I do anyway. And that actually makes me more depressed than working long hours.
Basically I would rather be a workaholic at a job I loved than work a 40 hour week at a job I hate.
My dad was an attorney at a big DC law firm and then a business executive. He worked hard, and long, and traveled a lot, and my mom was often asked if she thought he was a workaholic. She always said no, because her definition was that a workaholic was someone who used work to avoid home or other problems. That was not my dad. When he was home, he was home–mentally present with us, etc. I always thought my mom’s definition made a lot of sense.
Since I have no idea if I’ll have enough seniority to survive a possible layoff, I’m more or less working 7 days a week to accumulate a safety net. I’ll do that as long as I can before getting burnt out. i’ve done this for 2-3 week stretches before, and one nice thing is the first day off I get feels sooooo nice.
I think I’m not, because I don’t fit the “-aholic” part of the word. I work long hours when I’m at work, usually 9 hours or so a day with lunch at my desk, and I try to come in for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon to finish up projects or get myself organized and set for the coming week. I travel a lot for work and I’m pretty much on the clock all the time when I’m on the road.
But I love my job, and I get a lot of personal satisfaction from it. And I do go on vacations and when I’m not at work, I’m as seriously “not at work” as I am “at work” when I’m at work. If that makes any sense.
I think being a workaholic is when your own perception of how much time you need to work is in excess of reality - which is hard to judge from within your own head. I know. I’ve been there more than once, and ended up in hospital because of it as I ran my body into the ground. The world did keep going, and my school and students didn’t collapse. I always felt that any time not working was wasting time and consequently felt guilty.
I still feel that way, and still am happier working than doing most other things. Certainly than sitting around ‘relaxing’. It is partly that I have always done something which I really enjoyed and felt was important - teaching for most of my career, and now I’m a full time author. I now schedule in exercise, gardening and going to films, plus playing around with a deck of cards doing magic. And reading the SD and other sidelines! I work better now that I am controlling my workaholic behaviour, and my health (physical and mental) is much better.
I used to be a workaholic when I owned my own business, but that’s kind of the nature of the beast. If you’re not a workaholic and you haven’t made a name for yourself, you really have no other way to get work. So I would obsess about it constantly and work 12-14 hours a day.
My job after that - the one before the one I have now - I was not a workaholic and therefore didn’t fit well into the culture.
At this job, it’s a call center environment so, even though I’m not call center and am exempt and sometimes have to work the odd holiday or travel on business, people rarely work later than 5:30 or 6 because most people are literally punching in and out. It’s a complete departure from what I used to know and has its upsides and downsides: fortunately, no one is expected to work late; unfortunately, since it’s a call center environment, people are very militant about time and protocol, even for those of us who are exempt.
I am in software development and really enjoy it. Even after 20 years in the industry, there is so very much to learn that I spend a lot of my time doing my job and a lot of my time learning. But I suppose it is as much my hobby as it is my career. I suppose some would look at it as I am a workaholic, but I just mostly enjoy what I do.
Workaholic implies a debilitating addiction. The guy I used as an example earlier is like this. His job is everything. He is completely hated by just about all of his staff and peers because he has no regard for other people. It even creates problems with his wife as he will clearly put work ahead of anything else. Part of it was the culture of the company, but people like him contribute to that culture.
I’ve never had a job that I particularly enjoyed or cared deeply about, so I try to I put in exactly the amount of work that I feel justifies my level of pay – no more and no less. I believe that this is fair – both to myself and the company I happen to be working for. I’m not a big subscriber to the whole Protestant work ethic thing – which is to say I don’t believe that hard work, in and of itself, is a virtue. (Hard work connected to a worthwhile cause, on the other hand, is a different story).
When it comes to something like my artwork, I can be a slave driver to myself, but I’d hardly call that work, since I enjoy doing it so much. On the off chance that I’m ever able to earn a living with my art, then I would definitely become a workaholic.
