Sometimes work doesn't have your back

Lessons for the workaholic and those who find it hard to stop being productive

My Dad always had a study. When I was little it was a desk in my room where he worked late at night.

He was a university lecturer, a maths teacher, computer scientist, distance learning specialist, head of a department, trade union champion, and he spent long hours sitting at his desk. His students loved him and he was a skilled lecturer- charismatic, with authority and a bit of dry humour.

He was an early adopter of computers, and had a chunky, cream PC (which took up an entire wall in the 80s), soon adopting an Apple when they came onto the market. He was passionate about Apple devices - the shininess and efficiency of the products- the fact you could get so much done with these machines that got smaller and slimmer each year. One of the key differences in terms of his productivity was that he spent a lot of his life without tech so used pen and paper to scribble notes down.

It was a slower process with less pace and nervous energy. Even when there was no work to be done he sat at his desk and smoked.

Work was his life. It gave him solace. At the end of his life he was still working in a basement study- in fact the night before he passed he was mailing a student about his dissertation. The last words he said (on the phone) were to give his password to his computer so his student could be notified that he wouldn't be attending a seminar that day.

In the months after my step mum and sister died I would find him fully clothed on the bed, having walked 3 steps from his desk into bed, sometimes his pipe would be lying at an angle, like he had literally just expelled it from his lips with his first sleeping breath.

He buried his head in work. He wrote essays and sent them to me in the middle of the night (always political, anti-Tory, aghast at what was happening with a government who prioritised profit over people). He worked slow because he liked to ruminate about his responses (he was a philosopher), but he also did it (I suspect) because he didn’t want the work to finish. When it finished the trouble would start.

Better to work until you fell asleep and then start again.

In the past few years I too have developed an unhealthy relationship with work. And by work I mean everything I do that is not parenting/friends/self care/tidying the house. I immerse myself in it. When I’m working and it’s going well (if it’s a book or a market research project which is what I do in my professional life) I don’t come up for air. I sit on the sofa on my laptop, the ready meal lunch I’ve bought as a treat for my hard work burning in the oven, the kids at school. When I pick them up I stand in the park and check and check again that there are no more messages, no more needs, no more responses required right now.

When I join companies as an employee I look for people who will feel like family. I invest a lot of myself emotionally and try and understand the underlying personalities and dynamics. I am rarely wrong. This is just what happens from years of working in offices- you spot your people and you learn the ones to avoid like the plague.

In these periods, especially if it’s a new job, I am frenzied, like I have more to prove. I fight the people pleasing urges, but all the mails and messages are hard to ignore and I must try and keep everyone content (even the incompetent, robotic ones). I don’t listen to my kids because I’m replying to work emails. I keep an empty inbox, filing a mail the minute it comes into my inbox. It’s a tight ship.

My head is in work about 85% of the time.

I have however realised (through redundancies/toxic cultures/clueless management) that WORK DOES NOT HAVE MY BACK. It is the same with many women unfortunately. It has your back in theory but not when it comes to the crunch and times get tough. It doesn’t care if I am staring at my phone at a message sent at 5 in the morning, my finger trembling. It doesn’t care if I have no desk and sit on the sofa working and this fucks up my back. It makes it feel like a treat that I get to attend a physio appointment to fix this back and calls it ‘a balanced and flexible work culture.’

It’s like that boyfriend years ago. Luring you in with compliments about how great you are, how beautiful and then leaving you with a hangover at Clapham South tube station not knowing what’s hit you.

Hours later when you’re ruminating on whether you’ve done enough, written enough, delivered enough, perhaps worrying about one minor piece of criticism or that you didn't quite meet the deadline, or lacked clarity …well then this boyfriend, this emotional vampire, has disappeared, he’s DJing and can’t meet you but remember you’re great okay?

You really are. It’s not you, it’s me.

Yesterday I sat on the bed with my youngest daughter and we emptied tiny shells out onto the duvet. We put them into groups.

The ones with stripes.

The ones that were creamy coloured.

The ones that were broken.

We chose our favourites. We ranked them in beauty from 1-10. I felt my heart rest and a softness in my body that I hadn’t felt in months.

‘You can have this one,’ she said, handing me a perfect, grey snail shell, a glint of silver in its centre and fine, purple circular lines on the underside of the curve.

‘Stop hiding,’ Dad whispered, ‘Come out now. It’s not too late.’

We laid the shells out from biggest to smallest and started again.