Monday 14th October

I read an article in The Times today about being a workaholic, and how there are certain people who deliberately spend too much time at work because they prefer it to being at home with their family. That level of workaholism doesn’t really apply to me as I do enjoy going out to gigs and also watching television and listening to music. I have recently started to leave my laptop upstairs when watching television or having dinner to give myself a break from it all, as I have begun to realise how unsociable this was.

Doing a bit of reading into the ‘condition’, I was interested to see that a connection has been made with obsessive compulsive disorder, stress, and good old depression. This makes a reasonable amount of sense to me, as I live with this happy hat-trick. It really gets me down at times when I feel that I am going to die before I get to finish the projects that I want to finish, and that my office walls are closing in on me.

Having read the article with a great deal of interest, I did the test. The reader has to rate each answer: 1=Never 2= Rarely 3=Sometimes 4=Often 5=Always

1-      You think of how you can free up more time to work. (3)

2-      You spend much more time working than initially intended (5)

3-      You work in order to reduce feelings of guilt, anxiety, helplessness and depression (5)

4-      You have been told by others to cut down on work without listening to them (5)

5-      You become stressed if you are prohibited from working (5)

6-      You prioritise work over hobbies and exercise (5)

7-      You work so much it has negatively influenced your health (4)

If you score 4 or 5 on four or more statements it may suggest you are a workaholic.

(Quoted from The Times; Monday 14^th October 2013)

Oddly enough I had an early night last night as I had simply had enough, but I often see daylight before bedtime as I am in my office trying to catch up with myself. There is always something to do; comedy sketches to write (wrote one today actually, I’m filming them all next year hopefully), radio shows to prepare, audio books and a podcast series to record, and even something that isn’t really work but this blog is on the list of things that need doing. To be honest, the blog is a manifestation of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when I think about it, as nobody told me that I had to write it every day. Nobody told me that each one had to be more than five hundred words long, but for some reason that it the target that I set for myself. I suppose I should be glad that I don’t want to hit a specific word count, but I have newspaper reviews for that. Once I had decided to write a daily blog, it did become a mission in itself to come up with something. If I’m honest with myself then I don’t enjoy doing it but it gets me down when I fall a few days behind on publishing them. My enjoyment comes from reading old blogs back at a later time, and from seeing how many people have read each entry. I also have the need to regularly change to look of the blog’s front page to keep things fresh.

I managed to release the latest Robin Hood Sessions podcast today, and I have also recorded another edition of Steve’s LP Box. Not an entirely wasted day.

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