Once upon a time, a long time ago, I used to work hard.

I don't mean that I don't work now, but I used to work much harder. I would put in fifty hour weeks as a matter of course, I would be the first to get to the office and the last to leave, I wrote enormous amounts of code very quickly, and put in even longer hours if there was something that needed fixing or if there was a deadline.

Then again, this was also when I motivated myself by self-loathing, anger, and fear. I had no social life, my relationship sucked, and I lost touch with all of my friends. I put a lot into my job and I got money out, but I know for fact that most of the code I wrote has been thrown away. Sometimes I was there when the project was canned, sometimes the product just withered away.

Some of my greatest triumphs come from this period, but all of my greatest failures happened then too.

The terrible thing is that it felt wonderful to work so hard, to produce so much. I may have had no real effect, but the process was intensely exhilarating even as it sucked the life from me. It was so (and I use this term advisedly) empowering: I felt almost superhuman, like I could do anything, or that I would have done if I wasn't spending so much damned time at work.

It was a powerful drug. I try to avoid it.

I've been trying to avoid it since I started work here in the US. I made a conscious decision to work less intensely, to try and live my life rather than my job. I have to do this.

The root reason for my last depressive episode, the one during which I was diagnosed as being ADD, was that I hadn't figured out how to work without that drug, without the powerful cocktail of self-loathing, intense pressure, and just doing a great deal of work. It wasn't that I had forgotten how to work, it was that I just didn't know how to work without killing myself. I've been doing better this last year; I've even finished things without running right down to the last second or later. A couple of times.

And then sometimes I'll get a taste. Sometimes I find myself in a position where I am behind for some reason, or where a surprise requirement has popped out of the woodwork, and I find myself working long hours late into the night, listening to music and flowing into the code that I am writing, because I know what to do. And all seems right with the world again.

I am just coming down from one of these episodes, and I am shivering with the realisation that I still haven't figured this one out: I still don't know how to work in a measured, stable, consistent, and above all sustainable way. I have been doing better, but I still can't focus on what I am doing unless I am passionate about it. Even as I grind myself to dust trying to finish the job in time I still eat up the pressure, leave things late so that I will get a hit of the drug.

This simple truth is something I have not come to terms with.

My name is Duncan, and I am a workaholic.

Posted by Dunx at January 21, 2005 08:44 PM