Anyways, enough talk of a weekend well spent; this is a question I ask myself a lot around eleven at night when I'm half done a writing piece and I know I should be in bed already, but so far I've powered through and not missed a single day since that inaugural post in January. I thought, given my lack of sleep and wish for expediency, I'd write out a little thing about it and then ship myself off to the land of milk and honey or whatever the right metaphor/analogy/whatever is. Hope you enjoy it! A bit shorter than usual, but size shouldn't matter if the quality's good, so hope you enjoy! Have a lovely day, and see you tomorrow at eight AM for more.
The Merits and Detractive Qualities of Taking a Day Off by Mackinley Clevinger, April 3, 2016
There comes a time in many of our lives when one takes a certain amount of responsibility on one’s shoulders, and is thereafter required to work on a strict and regular schedule that outputs an amount of work in whatever format is demanded of your job: patients made better, articles written, or people managed. Oftentimes this responsibility has the individual answering to an employer, wherein if quality does not meet prearranged requirements, the employee is considered having failed and is punished accordingly. At other times, however, there is no boss, and entirety of the work-structure is one man or woman who has assigned themselves a schedule to keep, with no compunctions to meet those demands besides a vague inkling of eventual decline and failure in the commercial venture that they have led in the event of their dropping the ball.
This latter form of self-motivation leads one to wonder, on occasion, whether the act of taking a day off from work to unwind and relax is permissible given the fact that there isn’t, strictly speaking, anyone to hold you accountable for missing a deadline, making it a free crime of R&R. You aren’t involved in any kind of job-structure where your work is essential to the smooth-running of the whole; being self-employed or engaged in solo-work, the end result is entirely dependent on your contribution to a project which is on a schedule that you control. On a technical level, you could easily change the schedule to allow yourself a free day with no fear of someone else coming after you demanding you submit your work based on the non-edited schedule. However, such an act is not free of its own consequences, either.
A day off from a schedule you’d set for yourself may result in a loss of productivity, but it could restore your energy and enable you to work at a higher quality than before. Alternatively, a day off could also be the first step towards a loss of work ethic while saving you from losing complete interest in a field you had so desired that you tried to make it in life alone using it. Whether the answer to the question is to redouble your efforts and find a new strength within or back off for a day and remember to enjoy your life more, only the individual in their own unique situation can say. The schedule itself isn’t a resolute thing, either; if it’s a tad overloaded and constantly making you yearn for the days when life wasn’t so stressful and lacking in time to unwind, maybe you’re just trying for too much too soon. Such a change would, objectively, be giving yourself dedicated days off, but if its worked into a schedule that you follow resolutely, it should be less likely to lead into a spiral of sloth. Regardless of the choices made, the decision on whether or not to disrupt the orderly flow of self-employed work with a quite possibly well-earned day off is not one to make lightly, unless you’ve felt like death for hours and are physically incapable of bringing yourself to do anything productive. Cut your losses, enjoy the day, and come back reinvigorated tomorrow.