j’s scratchpad

I’ve been doing a lot of indexing and abstracting the last few weeks at work. It’s a task that requires lots of concentration on my part. Usually, my day is such that I do a variety of activities. Because of the amount of indexing I’ve needed to do, I’ve pretty much just been working on that one project and doing any other mission critical tasks.

I forget how much it takes out of me. When I get home, I find I don’t have the mental energy for things like blogging or conversation or writing my next talk. I stare into space and wonder why I’m so tired for a few minutes before remembering how much hours and hours of indexing can zap me.

I try to take breaks from the work. I try to space the work out so I’m not doing it for much longer than two hours at a time. Even if all I do at the end of two hours is get up and walk around the office, I still make myself do it to take a mental break.

If it was up to me, I probably wouldn’t work on such an intense project for more than two or three hours a day. After that, the quality of my work goes down and I’m just a bit more exhausted the next day.

I cope by:

• Taking short breaks from the work to do another task

• Wandering around the office after a few hours of work
• Incentives: After four hours, I can eat lunch. Another few and I can go home. Another week and I can finish this round of work.
• Joking that maybe it’s like exercise: If I do it enough, I’ll get used to it and I won’t find it so tiring.

Do you have work like this that leaves you exhausted? How do you cope? What’s your strategy?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 at 12:26 am and is filed under News Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.