He had left his last job specifically for the hours. Forty hours a week, maximum. He had been so clear about what he needed.
Six months in, he was working fifty. Not because anyone asked him to. Because the projects were interesting and the inbox was full and the habit of overwork had come with him and found new material.
He noticed it on a Thursday and sat with the recognition for a long time. He hadn’t changed jobs. He had changed rooms. The behavior followed him.
The problem of overwork is not always the job. Sometimes the job is the context and the person is the pattern. The long hours are a symptom not of a culture but of something inside the person that expands to fill available time, that mistakes busyness for security, that can’t sit with white space without reaching for something to fill it.
Change the job. The pattern comes too.
I did this. Changed circumstances and then watched myself produce the same outcomes in the new ones. Not because of external pressure. Because the internal driver was still running.
He’s at fifty hours a week. Nobody told him to be. He’s trying to understand what in him keeps making this choice before he’s aware of making it.
What would happen if he let the inbox stay full for a day?
The inbox will always be full. There will always be one more thing. The question is whether you have learned to put it down, or whether you keep picking it up because something in you needs the doing more than the job needs the done.
He’s aware of the pattern now. Awareness is not the same as change. But it is where change starts.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Have you ever changed your circumstances and then reproduced the same problem in them?
- What does being busy give you that being still doesn’t?
- What are you actually filling when you fill the hours?
You might also find yourself in He Thought the Feeling Would Pass. It Had Been Three Years..
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.