It’s FRIIIDAAAAAAAYYY!!!!!! And you made it, despite everything. I am very proud of you, and you should be proud of yourself.

And I have a mere 8 hours of work and I am off for the week. Work has been fine, but it’s time for a break. (We need 4 day workweeks, like, yesterday.)

Lily is bereft this morning because I closed the basement door and will not allow her to scream at my brother and make him come upstairs to brush her. We had a cuddle, and I have instructed her to eat her feelings for the moment. (And yes, that is water on her face from drinking from the bathroom faucet.)

I am so excited for some time off. Work really hasn’t been bad at all – I’ve managed to get it through to She Who Assigns The Bugs that I am not doing umcomped overtime (without actually saying it) and my workload has been downright reasonable – when they ask how much testing time I have, I say 6 hours a day. That takes care of meetings/admin stuff/training/something went sideways and takes longer than expected and I am not working 50+ hours a week.

Thing is – even the guy running our scrum meetings told a dev, “When you’re trying to figure out how long something will take, figure 6 hours a day that you can work on it, cause of admin stuff” so I’m not just pulling this out of my ass. Happy coincidence, but when I added up all the “not testing stuff” – it’s between 1.5-2 hours a day.

And, helping my workload a wee bit is that one of my coworkers from my old department moved to a new department. He was totally overwhelmed and struggling and I’d get “oh god, please help me” emails multiple times a week. None of the requests were unreasonable or took an inordinate amount of time, but a half hour here and there every other day adds up. (I was happy to help, but I’m also enjoying the quiet.)

And I’ve gotten a little Pomodoro timer app. I’d just been using the timer on my phone to schedule out “hey, take a short break” time, but this little interval timer somehow works better. (IDK how, you’d think a timer is a timer, but here we are.) The “default” for work focus was 25/5 x3, then 25/15. But 25 minutes isn’t enough, but 50 is perfect, so I do 50/10/50/15.

It’s a bit eerie how often that 50 minutes lines right up with a good stopping place in my work. And I know, “that’s a lot of time to not be working” – but at the end of the day, if I worked through that break time, I’d be useless the last hour or so of the day, so it’s a wash there, and I am not so mentally fried when quitting time runs around. And invariably one of those breaks hits at lunch and the end of the day.

And in using this, I can’t help but think about how this would never fly in support. We would have 2-4 hour blocks of blind incoming phone time – no breaks there, and the rest of the day, someone was always pinging you for something – either clients or coworkers and it was sad how often I would be gleeful that 6PM hit because it meant I could actually work. So glad I made the move – I genuinely enjoyed helping clients figure things out, but the conditions were just godawful. (And haven’t gotten better from what I hear.)

Well, time to go get those 8 hours in so I can be lazy for a week!

You have a great Friday!