User blog:Taldin/Freedom! Sort of.

The Project of Doom is over.

I've spent five months working almost non-stop for another group, on an emergency project with an immense workload and an impossible deadline. Nearly seven hundred manuals, five months, six writers. Dealing with desktop publishing programs that crashed on a regular basis, and books that weren't coming across in the conversion to XML well at all.

I get my life back now. Starting with my weekends. And no more working until 2 and 3am just to keep up with the pace of things.

It's a weird feeling.

So much for being a recovering workaholic -- I've got no idea what to do with myself right now other than consider trying to get ahead on more work, because my normal work responsibilities got quasi-covered by other people for five months (better than no coverage at least) and now I have to figure out what they did while I was busy saving the universe (okay, just the director's job).

Among other things? There are little projects I set aside on the Wiki to do when I got done with this. Some programming things I'd love to try implementing. But it's nice to actually be able to _breathe_ again without worrying about whether I should start another compile.

The weird thing about having free time again?

I don't know what to start on first.

Any habit you practice for 14-21 days becomes part of a routine. My routine for the past five months has been eat, work, and get a little bit of sleep, with a tiny bit of WoW raiding in there for sanity. But I gave up a ton of stuff for the sake of work, and now I don't need to anymore.

It's funny, the way that I am; I need to be doing _something_ to feel like I'm not wasting a day.

Doing nothing just feels odd.

Even though everyone says I need to take a vacation, I keep wanting to do productive things while on it.

Including work. :P

How do the rest of you learn to let go of work and just stop thinking about it, especially after a long project?