Working Life

Here's two things that have been going through my head about work lately:

* Heirarchy - been wondering about this whole "I'm more important than you" thing. Why do I have to respect someone just because their job description and salary say they're more important than me in the food chain? We work the same number of hours - sometimes I work more. We put in the same effort in our area of responsibility - though I may spend less time in meetings, and more time "getting my hands dirty" (ie working). Yet we're paid on vastly different scales, and I have to be subservient while they get to do whatever the hell they want to! Strip away the title, and there's very little reason to respect them. I guess this one goes across the board too - we're each given a certain number of hours in the day, and generally work "working hours", from the CEO in a large corporation to the janitor who sweeps the basement. Yet somehow society deigns that one is way more important than the other, a more valuable human being, and the other can be treated like trash. It's a completely artificial situation, and it doesn't make any sense to me at all. Unfortunately these revelations are not making me a very good employee... :-)

* Deadlines - I often find that I work better on a project if I have the time and space to sit with it a bit. Yes, there are timelines to getting things done, and sometimes I have flashes of brilliance that have me meeting them with aplomb. But other times inspiration comes slowly and takes pondering. For example, I'm working on a website at the moment, one I had hoped to have done within days - a week at the most. But it's taken longer than that as I sit and develop the backbone. The layout, the way it looks on screen, the behind-the-scenes structure of links and files, the coding that gives it functionality. I could do it all at once and have it up and running right away. Instead I've taken longer than I had hoped to, yet come out with things I wouldn't have thought of had it been online before now. OK - you can always tweak stuff, but it's a whole lot better to have it going well before you stick it out there for the world to see. I'm finding more and more that a bit of staring off into space, "doing nothing" is where the creativity builds, where the elements of a project fall into place, where lightbulbs go off. But having said that, there's some things I need to go implement immediately...

::update::
* Stress - I find I'm a whole lot less willing these days to take on stress. I'm irked by noise, by bother, by everything being urgent. In my ongoing quest for Serenity, the stress thing ain't helping. I used to thrive on bustle and busyness, urgency and rush. No more. The more I think about it, the more I realize I'm not willing to let it take over my life or affect my way of being. Perhaps I'm getting old, or just finding Me, but I really don't need it in my life. (Another reason I've become not the best employee? :-) ) I'm on a mission to find a stress-free life to match my inner calm, and the fewer feathers I get ruffled on the way there, the better.

I've been sitting with all these thoughts, formulating a Plan lately. As Baldrick (Black Adder) would say, "I have a cunning plan..." 'cept I hope mine are a bit more cunning than the ones he usually came up with!