A much-needed break…

And by break, I mean merely a 9.5 hour workday.

This long difficult work jag has left me with a lot of thoughts about what it is to be a good worker, a good manager, and a good time manager.  I’ve sat here for an hour or so staring at this screen off and on, and I just can’t seem to articulate my thoughts.  Perhaps it’s lack of sleep or the extra stress, but writing down my thoughts is about the last thing I want to do right now.

Ultimately, the equation always boils down to an overcommitment (usually due to some immovable deadline), a lack of willingness to chop down features or *gasp* not have ANY for a given iteration, or some technical hurdle that doesn’t pop up until the last minute.  It seems that only a small subset of our workgroup is willing to put up extra hours and continue to do the job right, so it always seems to fall to us to do a passable job.  That usually means a jag of long hours and high stress, but this particular series of unfortunate events began before Christmas.

The good news is that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on this particular set of problems.  I sure hope it’s not a train.