Well rested and ready to put in minimal effort - were my feelings coming into work post-Christmas. Did I contemplate calling out sick and extending my vacation to a third day? You bet your ass I did! But I'm not an amateur, I spread out my "sick days." It's Thursday after-all! Two more days and it's back to the weekend!
If my company was smart, they would have sat me down on December 1st and have said the following thing to me: "We're going to cut right to the chase: generally you do nothing. You bring absolutely nothing to the table and frankly, you should have been fired a long time ago. Having said all that, we would like to offer you a deal to either cut back your hours or have you take off the entire month of December." I definitely would have stopped listening to whatever offer they would have given me, and accepted the entire month off.
The lack of effort I have put into my work this month was abysmal. If I hadn't attended this month's meetings, that required a mandatory appearance on my part, there is a high chance my boss would have been filing a missing person's report by December 3rd. My boss, or really anyone with the authority, should have played the role of Howie Mandel and offered me a "Deal or No-Deal" at the beginning of the month. Instead, they choose to have me linger around like a parasite on its host body.
Since I pretty much did little to no work in the days leading up to the Christmas break, I had a lot of ground to make up. I needed to do something, I couldn't just keep putting my work aside, so I went through my pile of paper and organized them into different stacks of equal proportions. The three stacks were as follows: "Important," "Could Wait," and "Shredder." The first two categories are pretty self-explanatory. The third category - "Shredder" - are papers I deemed not important (to me, at least), thus allowing me to discard of them via the shredder.
Obviously tackling the "Important" stack was priority A-one. It was a shock to my system when I dove right in and actually started to do my work. It felt like the first day at the gym after a month of sitting on the couch and crushing bags of chips. I am not in shape to do this.
If I was going to get through this day, I needed to take it slow and steady. After all, a workday is a marathon, not a sprint. If you were to compare my working speed today to that of the mile pace splits in a marathon, I would be running 25 minute miles.
I was really taking my time today, not for precision, but for reasons of falling into old habits real quickly. As soon as I would start on a project, my attention would be onto something else. The more I worked, the smaller my attention span became. I wonder what is on Facebook? Any breaking news in the world of sports? Maybe I should find a recipe for all that leftover ham? What is the name Peggy short for?
Soon enough, time passed and the dent I made into the "Important" stack was barely noticeable. I spent more time on Wikipedia than I did on my work. The image on my desk at that time looked looked almost identical to when I initially made the three stacks of paper. To make myself more worried, I realized I didn't even touch the "Could Wait" stack, which made me freak out a bit. Feeling like the clock was working against me, I made an executive decision - I was going to merge the "Could Wait" stack with the "Shredder" stack. Basically, I wanted to shred some paper, which I did, as I discarded of the newly merged "Could Wait" and "Shredder" stacks.
I felt a little relief come over me when I was down to one stack of paper. The stress-free moment was much needed. Once I realized that I shredded 66% of my work, a feeling of uneasiness once again sat in my gut. The feeling of uneasiness was also probably aided by the fact that is was only 10:30 in the morning.
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