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Plenty of people work 50 hour weeks. But those jobs tend to be either well-renumerated or (relatively) low-stress.
But if you're not doing any novelling right now, and you think it's just because you don't have the time to do so it might actually be because you're not that passionate about writing, just a thought. Are you filling up every spare moment of the day with writing up new ideas and literary creations? If so, then you're a novelist.
But if you're thinking "I'd like to stop working my current stressful 9-5 and spend all that time on coming up with a great novel", then, I don't think that's gonna work.
He recently went part time in his job to have more focus on it, but has actually got writers block because it's become a job rather than a hobby.
Is your heart solely compromised because of a previous condition or is it partly self inflicted (shit phrase but you get my drift) you mentioned substance abuse. Stress causes many people to relapse simply because they feel the need to self medicate. It’s great that your dry now but do you fear relapse?
The effects of stress, over the long term are insidious.
It took me 5 years to address my stress and anxiety and by that point the damage to my mental health was huge and I’ve had a long road back to where I’m at now.
It sounds like you’ve had a pretty rough time with your health over the years. I know it’s easy to say but your health comes first, mental and physical.
I can’t give careers advice, I’ve never had an interview and I wouldn’t know one end of CV if it bit me on the end of my nose but I know all about letting stress affect your health and as you creep up to 50, trust me, the physical and mental effects of stress get magnified by a factor of a million.
Yes, basically.
I do live in the barren north though, where houses cost £5k and a packet of crisps.
I know it's not a fortune but it's more money than I ever expected to make, and I've spent most of my working life on half that, so that's my perspective on it. I don't really feel like my bosses are taking the piss. Around here that's about standard salary for any equivalent job.
I take your point about getting help, but that's already happened and what I've learnt is that when you delegate the work doesn't disappear - if anything the time you spent doing that work yourself is taken up managing those who are now doing it. And if they do it badly - let's just say I recently had to let an employee go for a number of reasons, one of which was that his productivity was close to nil. It was added stress having him on and even more stress making the decision to end his employment. My team are currently good people but my observation on that is I still feel their work is my responsibility and their failures are my failures.
I'm absolutely passionate about writing, and more than that I do want to do it for a living. It's my ideal career.
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
My hypertension may have been pre-existing but it was unknown until I had my aortic dissection. I was fortunate that it was managed conservatively, but there was a week where they were going to replace a heart valve. My blood pressure is now not great. I'm on two medications for it and have resisted a third because of the effect everything that's been tried so far has on my sex life. I don't know the extent to which my painkiller addiction caused the dissection, although there's no medically established relationship with any drug other than cocaine, which I've never taken. Opiates tend to lower blood pressure and slow the heart rate. One of the consultants said it was more likely the stress on my cardiovascular system from the chemotherapy and stem cell transplant I had in the 90s.
I appreciate all this kind of input because I "feel" healthy right now, as in I'm not in any pain and everything is working "okay". Intellectually I know the effect stress can have on the body, but it's extremely difficult to factor in because I feel so much pressure to power through it and get to work and earn and so on. I know a lot of this pressure is in my head.
I spoke to my wife this morning (she was bit hung over from drinks with friends last night as it was 6.30 so she maybe wasn't as gung-ho as she might have been) but she's broadly supportive, although she did echo my concerns over how "taboo" it is to express the desire to work less. Again I work in the kind of environment where workaholism is admired and praised, and taking a sick day is seen as a sign of weakness. She also suggested just looking for another job, but the more I think about it the more I'm sure that I want to have less work, rather than less stressful work.
My thinking right now is to work this week and gauge the atmosphere within the business, and how my bosses are feeling about my value to them right now. If it's generally positive I'm going to approach them on Friday with the idea of a 3-day week. The argument for me is primarily my health long-term but also my stress levels and general happiness now. The argument for them is a huge saving on my wage, plus increased productivity on the days I am working (I'm basically going to try to sell them that I could get four days' work done in three, which to be fair is I think very possible).
I'm honestly not sure how they will react. It could be a flat "no", in which case I know what I need to do next. It could be an offer of compromise on four days, which I'm willing to consider as a starting point (although my suspicion is this would create a situation where they expect me to cram a full week's work into four days). They might even go for the three, I'm not ruling it out. From their perspective the main issue is my job requires me to be present every day, which they'll need to replace in some way, but it's also varied from day-to-day, which creates a problem if there's for example a meeting I need to attend on a day I'm not in. These however as has been pointed out above are things which they are now by law required to at least attempt to remedy.
I'll keep you all updated. Thanks again.
Wife worked as a manager of a multiple houses of"supported living" special needs people . She cared massively for the service users, which dragged her into doing all hours under the sun and was ALWAYS on call , even when she wasn't. Her staff were useless cunts who couldn't care less. Her upper management told her to "change her management style" ... And ignored the fact she previously had no people management experience or training , and they offered no support at all.
People management is not easy.
This was all whilst suffering badly with endometriosis - which would have her fetal on the floor with pain, despite the exhaustive list of medication she was taking .
We took 3 months off. Travelled round new zealand. Within 2 weeks she was all but off the pain medication (apart from bad flare days , I won't go too heavy into endo' now). Her moods improved to the point we both realised she was likely had undiagnosed depression and anxiety .
She now works behind reception at a vet's. The money isn't great, and she does get bored sometimes because she's smart and likes to challenge herself. But she gets to see lots of dogs, gets on well with her peers and manager, and most importantly she leaves any issues at the door when she clocks out.
Forgetting about the money for an instant, if you delegate tasks and your workload doesn't diminish then you did something wrong.
Either:
1. You delegated to the wrong person, in which case delegate to someone else.
2. You are incapable of 'letting go' (some people would call this control freakery).
3. Either you or the organisation are too short sighted to accept that when you delegate tasks you take a slight hit at first whilst they get up to speed and things will take slightly longer than usual. Stick with it - is it better that it takes a few days longer right now or doesn't happen at all when you have a heart attack or quit?
From the way you said your teams work is your responsibility I strongly suspect the root of your issue lies between 2 and 3. If it's 2, you'll feel stressed anywhere.
I've worked in manufacturing, and the situation you describe is a disaster waiting to happen. You have a single point of failure who is (seemingly) responsible for everything and who is in danger of either walking away or falling over. Unless you work with the organisation to (actually) change things, here's the possible outcomes:
1. You become a bottleneck for everything, putting even more stress on yourself. Efficiency suffers.
2. You snap and walk away, leaving a whole bunch of jobs that other people don't know how to do
3. You make yourself ill to the point of collapse, leaving a whole bunch of jobs that other people don't know how to do
None of those scenarios help anyone.
Going back to the money - just because it's more than you thought you'd earn, doesn't mean it's worth the cost. Fully aware its very, very easy to say and a lot harder to live through but high stress and long hours for 'ok' money is not a good deal.
Good luck.
I've got a GP appointment (by phone) at 10am this morning to discuss all of this. I suppose I'm laying some groundwork before I go back to my to my bosses, and with what I expect will be the doctor's advice to more proactively manage my stress levels I can make the point that putting something more sustainable in place now will reduce the likelihood of "signed off work with stress" a few months down the line when I have a nervous breakdown.
Again I'm hoping for positive outcomes but I'm aware they may not happen. The more I've been thinking about it the more comfortable I'm getting with the idea that if a compromise can't be reached I can in extremis just walk away. I had a long conversation with my father who's always been very clear on such things and his verdict is that I've gone through so much shit in my life that I can be forgiven for choosing to not endure any more of it.
I take on board your comments about my management style - I'm not a trained manager, I've only been doing it for a short time and I'm well aware that I'm basically not good at it, nor will I likely ever be. If I can scale back my hours I suspect that it'll be one of the things that gets addressed.
I know a lot of you guys have opinions about my employers and I don't necessarily disagree with you, although as you can imagine the circumstances are a lot more complex and nuanced than I could fit into a reasonable forum post. It's true there are many imperfect circumstances within the company which have arisen from growing so quickly and focusing more on that productive growth than on taking the time to properly establish a team. I've benefited from it but I'm also suffering from it.
In hindsight a crucial point I left out, just because I was already dishing out a lot of background info, is that I started working at our main factory, which is a very harsh environment: dirty, noisy, cold, uncomfortable and so on. About six months after I started my health took a quite marked dip, which I brought to the MD. He offered to me to come work at head office instead, which is a much nicer and calmer environment based in a small city centre, and immediately my health improved. Over the past three months it has become clear that for the benefit of the company my team needs to move back to the factory, so I'm again based there. This is obviously not the only factor in my current ill health and discomfort, but it would be disingenuous to claim that environment has no effect on wellbeing.
One of the reasons I believe my bosses might respond well to my request is that they have previously accommodated me in this way. At the time this coincided with a colleague going on maternity leave, which opened up a position I was able to step into. This is not the case now so I don't know to what extent they would be prepared e.g. to change my role or create a new role for me to move into, although I do think there may be scope for this as the business is still growing.
This. My wife nominally works part time but does longer hours than me, even though I am full time.
The way I see it I've only really got one bargaining chip, which is the potential they'd have to replace me. For seeing first-hand how hard it is to even find suitable candidates for these roles, let alone hire the correct one, I do see it as having value, but really I don't know the full picture of how I'm perceived by my bosses or how much they'd be prepared to accommodate before they decide losing me would be less impractical. For all I know they've been dying to replace me for months and are just waiting for the opportunity (I don't think that's the case, but you never know).
As I say it's a gamble, but what I need to keep at the forefront of my mind is that the reason I'm doing it, i.e. my health, is intractable, so if they either can't or won't accommodate me I basically have no choice but to look elsewhere.
I have an assistant who for a time was in-line to take over from me while I moved onto a more technical role. This has for various reasons not happened, probably the main one being that she hasn't really risen to the challenge. Among my other staff there isn't a clear candidate for rising through the ranks. I don't think they'd go for hiring someone to train up to take over from me, and my feeling is that process would if anything create more stress in the months leading up to my downscaling.
Similarly the side hustle thing isn't for me. More work, more responsibility and so on, plus the inevitable suspicion that I'd have been better off just keeping all of the main job. I think my goal ultimately is to sacrifice some of my salary in exchange for more spare time. I'll do things in that spare time, obviously, but not with a view to making money from them. Not immediately, anyway.
My advice would be to sit down and work out exactly what you think would work for you, if you were to stay at the company. Also try to think about it from the employers point of view, so you can prepare for any objections, as businesses are not employment charities. Then go and speak to your stakeholders.
Your company clearly values you, as they have promoted you and given you a substantial pay increase over only a few years. Despite what a lot of people think, businesses are not evil and the people running them are as human as anyone else with their own stresses and life challenges. I'm sure they want happy and healthy employees, more than they want stressed, sick employees, as they are more productive anyway. I can't imagine anyone hearing your story and how the stress is effecting your health, wouldn't try to help find a solution for you.
If that all fails, sell up, move to Greece and play guitar for a living, with the time you have left.
I wish you the best of luck and good health!
Just those few extra hours for yourself might free up some head space and give you time to plan your next move.