Workaholic

After two consecutive weeks of working sometimes 14 hours a day, weekends, and at all hours of day and night, I am more curious than ever as to how people can do this kind of thing for months or even years.  I know people who regularly work 60-80 hours a week and accept it as just a normal way of life.  They say that they don’t necessarily intend to work such long hours – that it just happens.  I always thought that the people who do this do it because they find some enjoyment out of it, but I’m beginning to think that it’s something else altogether.  I think it becomes a compulsion just like any other addiction.

Just like how someone is addicted to some substance that gets them high, I think workaholics may have seen some joy and sense of accomplishment at some point when they worked hard and met some goal.  But just like in substance abuse it takes more and more to get even the slightest amount of pleasure.  I think they’re chasing some day when they don’t have to work so hard, only to find that the day never comes. 

Or maybe it’s for the money.  It is a really good motivator to most people – at least for the short term.  One time when I first started this project, they offered each of the engineers five $2000 bonuses for each of five different sub-deadlines we had to meet.  The first deadline was easy enough to meet with just a little bit of overtime, but as the problems mounted, the deadlines slipped further and further out until it was pretty pointless to chase the other bonuses.  And at that time the money ceased to be a factor at all.  Plus, I know that a lot of the people who work those crazy hours work most of them on their own time.

I don’t think fear of being laid off is the motivation either.  These days it’s almost hard to lose your job unless you’re completely incompetent (then they just promote you to management – haha, just kidding).  Most workplaces are desperately trying to increase their retention rate so that they don’t waste money on training new people.  Is it to get that great promotion?  I don’t think so.  Usually they try to keep the hardest and most effective workers in the trenches working.  As the addage goes… “don’t get too good at your current job because they’ll want to keep you there forever.”

So what is it?  I think I know part of the answer.  The last two weeks while my life was virtually consumed by my job, I found an odd “rhythm” to it.  I didn’t have to think about what I needed to do next.  I knew what I had to do next – work.  It almost felt as if time was passing, and that it was time being productive.  It seemed easy to feel as if every moment of my life for that day had a purpose.  When my co-workers gasped when they saw my email to them with the timestamp of 3AM, I felt a small sense of pride that I was a good worker ant that day. 

Speaking of ants, I think it was mildly symbolic that my desk in my office in L.A. was crawling with dozens of ants most of the time I was there.  They were crawling around my desk in search of food to bring back to the collective.  I would put an obstacle in its way, and it would dutifully find some way around it to report back to the nest that it found my bagel crumbs.  Then I thought that God was probably looking down on me in much the same way, smiling at how busy I was making myself.

But anyway, as the week was drawing to a close and I knew that I would be returning home, I felt strangely empty.  It felt like my life was put on hold for two weeks and that time had passed and I had not really experienced anything.  I felt as if I had gone to sleep and given away two weeks of my life.  Yes, I had accomplished quite a bit of work in my many hours in the office, but for what?  I came back to the Maryland office with yet another problem to fix.  In the big picture the extra money I’ve made won’t really mean too much.  I’d much rather have held my new baby nephew in my arms than made ten times that amount in wages.

I don’t think there’s any danger of me becoming a workaholic… for better or for worse.  It’s been said many times that no one ever goes to their death-bed saying that they wished they’d spent more time in the office.  Remember that when God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden, work was a part of their punishment… not a reason to live.