There is a fine line between having just the right amount of work and being way too busy. And then of course there is also being way too slow. In a matter of a couple of hours I can go from just right to overloaded. Last month I was way too busy (241 hours billed - this is way too much), my present goal is to have just enough work (which means I want to keep my cushion so I need 170 billable), however, I am currently falling way below the line (uh, not sure where yet). Rarely do I find that I have just the right amount of work - it's just impossible to nail this balance perfectly because it isn't really within my control. I knew this would happen - that there would be a lull when this recent project ended. I wasn't sure how much of a lull, but I knew there would be one.
You might think I would enjoy it. Why not enjoy the downtime, right? You never know how much you are going to get and it's very possible that you will have multiple months over 200 in a row. So enjoy it, leave early, blog, shop online, take a walk, appreciate that you can leave at 5 p.m. and not work on weekends. Love every second of it. I am trying to bite my tongue and not go into the partner's office and tell him I'm worried about the work load (cause I, uh, did that on Monday). He just laughs at me anyway and then when I am drowning again, he likes to remind me that I was once worried that there wouldn't be enough. He told me on Monday that I should be worried about having too much in the near future. The problem with right now - is that it's unscheduled downtime. That's why I don't enjoy it.
I like to schedule my downtime - you know, take a vacation or something or take a day off. I like to plan my downtime in and choose when it happens and unfortunately, it doesn't work this way. It's just slow when it's slow and rarely when I want it to be slow. Then of course the day that I want to be off, to go home to Michigan for example, I'll be drowning and unable to go. Or the vacation that I do plan way off in the future will coincide with some really big deadline and I'll end up working during my vacation anyway. There really is no such thing as vacation time for us. All time that isn't billable time is just lost time, like now, blogging. Time I have to make up for later in the grand scheme of billing hours. My time never feels like my own.
It is almost inevitable that I will screw around here on the Internet for several hours today and then at 5:05 something will happen and the next thing I know it will be 8 and I will still be here. I don't mean to complain though - I was thinking earlier today how fortunate I am to have a job that I actually really truly like a lot. Most people with my kind of job can't even say that. They might do the job for various reasons but will admit to not liking it at all. I really do like it. Now, if only had some actual work to do.
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