Peak life
One of the things I enjoy about being a civil engineer is that there is a custom in Sweden that everyone in the business goes on vacation during the three weeks 29-31. In practice, this means that the email and the telephone is completely quiet for three whole weeks. I don’t even have to turn off my work phone or put it into flight mode. And the best part is that my second son arrived precisely two weeks before the building vacation, which meant I could grab my ten days of parental leave and connect five whole weeks with my family. Peak life. However, there was a couple of dark clouds on the horizon which I couldn’t get rid of until this last Friday.
Before my leave, I had created a to-do list of all my commissions and deliverables that had to be marked “done” before I could relax. When you are waiting on the delivery of a child, it is challenging to plan and schedule, to say the least. Because you know that any hour you will need to drop everything and just go. The checklist is very helpful, cause then you can rank order the tasks according to importance and start from the top. But still, you can never be certain that you will make it through the whole list. And that is stressful, no matter how you look at it. I got through my whole list except two tasks. These two weren’t mission critical, because I knew that it wouldn’t make much of a difference with my client if they got the delivery on the last day before the vacation or the first day when we start again. But for me, it does make a difference.
When you have unfinished tasks on your mind, you probably won’t be able to fully let go until you complete them. Just like some bloatware that slows down your mental PC. For me, it feels as if I have homework that I must complete, and I cannot relax fully until it is done. Remember that every time you think about the so-called homework, that’s a thought wasted that you could have spent on something else. And it will clearly increase your stress level, albeit ever so slightly. The only remedy I know of is to take the bull by the horns and get it over with. Sometimes even if you are on vacation. This time I chose to let it be and just focus on my family, even if that meant a certain loss of focus (mental bloatware). The other option would have been to skip one or two vacation days and head back to the office, as early as possible into my leave. Had I done so, I would have erased the feeling of unfinished homework from my mind. But it would have come with a price. My wife would not have been happy. And as the saying goes: “Happy wife, Happy life.” Very easy.
Other times when I end up in similar situations that require working weekends or late-night hours, I might choose to pay the price. Wait a minute, in practice, I send the “invoice” to my wife. But it might be worth it. It all depends on the homework. If we are talking some mission critical tasks here, I know that will not be able to relax at all until it’s done. And then I won’t be present, even if I’m in the room. In those cases, it is better to finish the homework as soon as possible.
I guess that a general rule would be to always finish off the work as soon as humanly possible, no matter if it is client commissions or vacuuming the floors at home. Don’t let it become “homework”. But that of course is only possible if you can rank order your tasks perfectly, with regards to importance. That’s where experience comes into the picture. The older you get, the wiser you get (hopefully). And wisdom greatly aids the rank ordering process. As a rookie, rank ordering is close to impossible. If you don’t know which tasks are more important than the others, you must treat every single task as mission critical. Which they aren’t.
I suppose that I must have made some progress with the wisdom part, because I managed to get a full five-week family leave+vacation and treat life as what it really is. Peak life.