Monday, April 19, 2010

Work, work and more work.....

Good god, it has been days and weeks since I have updated this blog! I don’t like that at all. The reason for this lengthy delay in my blog posting is all related to one thing – work.

I should give you a tab bit of background about my work. When I graduated from college in 1988, I immediately went to work for a company called Andersen Consulting. (They changed their name in 2001 and are now called Accenture.) Back in those days I was a computer programmer and I spent all my time working on different projects. I would spend 6 – 8 months on a project for a client and then I would move on to another project. As each project went through its various cycles I would frequently have to work tons and tons of overtime as we got closer to “go-live”. “Go-Live” is of course the time when we would turn the new system on. Fortunately back then, I used to get paid for overtime so I never really minded it.

As the years have progressed I have continued to work for companies that always deployment me in this “project mode”. The pattern continued through my years at Andersen/Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers and my current employer. Though I no longer do IT/computer system related work, I continue to work on projects that have a very distinct lifecycle of sell, design, implement and go-live.

I have been assigned to my current project for the last 40 months. The project involves the divesture of a division of my company and its establishment as a separate company. The last days of this project are finally starting to come into focus. Unfortunately this means that I am getting my butt kicked by the amount of work that I need to do. Now let me be clear – I am not complaining about working as that is not the case. It’s just the quantity of work that I am doing is keeping me away from many of my other pursuits.

It is amazing how easily you can become used to working on a continuous basis. I think in some ways that is a good thing as it keeps you from getting too stressed out. I do tend to vent about it a bit, but otherwise I just tramp through it. The toughest part of all this work is that I now am traveling to Boulder every single day. This adds 1 – 2 hours of commuting onto my schedule in both the morning and evening. That is what really seems to eat up the day!

Other than the amount of time spent on work, things are going well. Zack is continuing to mature and grow. It is hard to believe that he is nearing the end of his education at Willow Creek Elementary. For me work is the be all and end all at this moment but there are other things that are going on, but those are left for discussion on another day.

I do hope to be able to write a lot more in the coming days and weeks again. It is still my goal to get at least 200 blog entries out there in this blog for all of 2010.

We hope everyone has a great week!

Thanks and peace to all! ~ J.

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