Time to take time to take leave…

Recently, I needed to cancel some leave to get a jump start on some requirements gathering and design work over the holiday season. It wasn’t a real problem as I had not made any real plans — in fact, I had planned specifically not to schedule any activities or tasks for myself so as to allow me to take some down time.

I haven’t taken more that a week of in a single stretch for almost three years now, so I was looking forward to a solid four weeks away from software development. I thought to myself that postponing that break by a month or so was no big deal.

Boy, was I wrong!

While it was absolutely the right decision at the time (for a set of very real commercial considerations), I have found that my effectiveness has plummeted over this period. I don’t know how much of it was just burn-out and how much was related to the last-minute change of plans, but the effect has been very real and very noticeable. I wake in the morning and just can’t be bothered going in to the office. I can’t get excited about what is going on. I can’t even be bothered to go out and socialise with our friends.

I was already a little off my game, which was why I had planned to take the time off, but in the month or so since I postponed that leave I am sure that my performance has steadily declined. It’s hard to quantify, but if I take a wild guess that I was at 90% effectiveness in mid-December, I am probably now at 60% (in late January). At this rate, if I don’t take the time to recharge, I’ll go into negative effectiveness sometime in March or April…

So, I will definitely be taking time off in February, probably the whole month.

And who knows, I might even get back to doing some more regular blog postings.