I feel so tired after half a day of work, never mind working a full day. After a couple of weeks of this, when i get home, i have no energy left for anything. Even things I usually enjoy.
Everything feels like a drag at that point and I can’t seem to do anything to improve this.
Doing this for a few more months usually ends up with me having to quit my job or i will get so tired and sick I can’t do anything anymore.
What worked for me was to start working from home. I had a similar experience before the pandemic, but once I started to work from home this feeling went away.
I guess for me, the office has too many distractions. It was hard to focus on my work. All these distractions put a big toll on me over time. Traveling to and from work was also too exhausting.
I think the period I worked from home was actually quite uncomfortable for me.
Initially it felt great, having more control over my environment and being able to take breaks at will.
But i also noticed that I spend way too much time on my computer. So i went from working to gaming and browsing without a moment in between.
At the moment it feels like I burned out myself on screen usage.
And I found it very hard to make friends or get to know people better. I’m already not good at this, but only having snippets of time with my colleagues combined with staying at home after hours meant that i basically had no moments to make new friends or spend time with the few people I know.
I’ve always heard that wfh can be really hard to manage if you don’t have a separate environment for work. If you’re just working from your normal ‘play’ space your brain has a very hard time breaking out of those patterns and focusing on specific tasks that aren’t what you’re used to in that context.
I definitely noticed this.
But also the opposite seems to be true.
When i worked at the office in my last job, I find it almost impossible to take a decent break. When I’m in the office, it seems like the only thing I can do is work. But that quickly leads to exhaustion.
At home I can more easily take a break. But then I have to be careful I don’t turn it into a gaming/browsing binge.
Just sitting in front of my computer and working can already be enough trigger to start wasting time on other activities on my computer.
My apartment is a bit too small to have separate areas for work and play though. And i don’t really have the funds to have a separate computer setup for either.
Here it’s quite typical to have a 30 min break for lunch.
But that’s just spent on getting food, eating and returning to the office.
It just doesn’t feel enough for me on a given day.
And I’m really bad at figuring out how to take short breaks like my colleagues do. Having a 10 min talk with coworkers doesn’t really feel like a break. And I often don’t know how long and what kind of things are acceptable, so I tend to avoid taking any breaks.
Sounds stupid, but there is just some kind of underlying fear that I can’t get out of my head. And having less time to work on my actual responsibilities make that more stressful as well.