Coping with long 12hr days

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They sound like an MRA to be honest. The "we hunted the mammoth, women have never worked hard they just sit around eating bon bons, men fight and die in the military while women sit at home protected." Essentially twisting facts and outright spreading false information.

Like the fact that in hunting gathering society the gatherers were the ones getting the most amount of food and resources through their method. Lower class women have worked hard since forever. In the US women weren't ALLOWED to serve in the military for centuries and are discouraged from serving now. And on top of that when there is war women and children and the ones affected the most usually in the counties where the war is taking place. But they genuinely believe that men (specifically white men) have done everything and women have done nothing and constantly try to start pointless fights.

And for what it's worth no one should be working that many hours a day regardless of gender. It doesn't even make sense because we stop being that productive after a certain point and it's inhumane.

My dear fellow aspies, you're going off-topic. Gender equality is important and surely worth discussing somewhere else, but let us stick to the Edentiel's first post: She's having trouble coping with a high work load and needs help with just that.

Like I said, contacting the college administration and asking them for disability support could be a good idea.

I also suggest that Edentiel reads about Asperger syndrome and the challenges it gives you. I'm thinking sensory overload and a low tolerance for multitasking, which are very common problems among aspies. You can't really google those things, so my best suggestion is going to the library and asking for books about Aspergers. I can recommend the book "Anxiety and Asperger Syndrome" by Nick Dubin, even if it's a bit shallow.

If the stress is really tearing Edentiel apart, go see a doctor.

Oh wait, I got confused with the names in my last post. I meant GamingMaestro, not Edenthiel.

Oh, it's definitely not to the point of tearing me apart. I just haven't been in a situation where I've had a whole day worth of things to do and couldn't control when breaks were, so the whole "work for a few hours, shovel food down in 30 mins-1hour, then rinse and repeat until the day ends" thing isn't something I have any coping strategies for. Thank you for the book recommendation though, I definitely will have to check it out.

BTW, this forum needs the ability to +1 a post. Because I totally want to +1 Allicat's post like a zillion times.

Crikey, how does gender get wrapped into everything. This is about hours.

My usual weeks are like 55-75 hours but twice in my life I had to do 100 hour weeks for a couple of months at a time. After a while you organically find ways to stay up late or drive yourself - like I do tend to break tasks down into chunks, keep detailed logs of what I've done, and keep nice lists of what needs to be done. Probably excessive lists, but they are the only way I can keep it straight. With a list you can go off on a tangent of passion, solve that tangent problem, and find your way back to where you were.

I seem to have certain things I do when I have a long term deadline; kind of pacing out my late nights until the deadline gets close then do an all nighter or two. It's a complicated game.... like eating lots of protein when staying up really late. I don't know why.

I need to see a bigger picture and my progress to the bigger goal - in my case it's usualy software or data, so I like to see a long growing list of crossed out things on my whiteboard as I get closer the the final goal.

No idea if this has anything to do with your domain. But there you go. I've been kind of like this for maybe 30 years...

I think it absolutely is, and you should go for it! This is clearly important to you.

Also, Fnord is being a dick. I apologize on behalf of the male gender.

Not a bad idea, but get some info from another source as well. Sometimes these people make a huge affair about how tough they are and slap down other people's dreams. It's often about being flexible and coming up with hacks. Someone without your life experience might not understand that this is possible.

And then they smartened up, formed unions and started campaigning for an eight hour day.

Eight hours work, Eight hours sleep, Eight hours recreation and education, as they used to say.

As for GamingMaestro's initial question, without knowing the specifics of the job, all I can say is that once you start work, you learn various hacks:
* which tasks can be combined and done together;
* which tasks are supposed to done daily, but can be put off and done in one big lump each week;
* identifying short-cuts;
* identifying key elements and making sure they're done, which sometimes means the rest of the task is completed almost automatically;
* prioritizing so you do the difficult tasks in the morning when you're fresh, leaving the routine stuff for later in the day — seriously, this is a big one, doing a demanding task when you're tired means it takes longer.

There are probably a few others, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

Perfect.

Also: when you go through periods when you have no choice but to work very long hours, you have to plan some r&r at the end of it. Being exhausted after something like that is fairly predictable, but it'll take longer for you to recover than others. I've spent years making plans that failed simply because I could not accept that I was different.

There is a possibility that it won't work anyway. Project work can be problematic because it can push you over the edge without allowing you enough time for recuperation. All the hacks in the world can't help you if the difference between what you are able to achieve and what people expect from you are too big. The exception is when you can compensate by doing some things much faster than others. I've been able to do that in the past based on much faster pattern recognition.

(pssst. Just to point out, during those centuries women were not just sitting on the couch eating bon-bons, even after mechanical refrigeration was invented. Cooking, cleaning, sewing, large scale gardening, milking cows or goats, chickening, carrying & raising 10-15 children back in the day. Piecemeal sewing & similar work on top of that before the industrial revolution, working in factories afterwards. Dying by the dozens or hundreds in factories before labor laws & fire escapes were invented. Also, a not-insignificant contributor to men dying earlier is far less estrogen & its protective effect on the heart.)

And laundry. Laundry is the real killer in the pre-industrial world

I once toured the home of a Railroad Robber-Baron (post- industrial revolution). There was a massive basement the footprint of the entire mansion; a steampunk dream, it was the laundry facilities and employed something like 75 women who worked from dawn til whenever they were done. And it was brutal work, too...

The dream-career work for OP sounds different from washing laundry though... And productivity gains (in commercial and domestic chores) have likely done more to reduce our working hours than unionization. Dishwashers, computers.

However, unions and accomodations and speaking up to the boss don't apply so much when you're working on your own as a freelancer or entrepreneur. I've been on my own so long.... the hours are more due to random scheduling or chasing down rabbit holes on my own or just a big deadline for a project. But, the work is fun and feeds my aspie brain so I don't mind until it gets past 70-80 hours.

Since I get kind of obsessed with making things work, but need support in organizing it, I have built little methods/systems to keep track of what I'm supposed to do and where I am, and then just let myself go with the obsession or passion until I need to come up for air.

Are we here to help OP deal with/understand the potential hours of the job, or to complain against the system they are choosing to play in?? I thought it was the former...

I didn't quite understand what you are commenting about. Is anybody complaining? What about?

Also, the OP is in doubt whether this is a good career choice for her. It would be good to have a realistic view of the profession before entering it, in case she needs to change direction a bit.

However I'm interested in how you deal with keeping track of things. I'm scared of going into the rabbit hole because I practically forget my own name when I'm focusing on things. Concretely, what is it that you do?

People have been linking the OP's question to gender disparity and political trends beyond the scope of anything that can be done here and now. That's all. I was just feeling for OP 'cause it's offtrack but who knows maybe they like it.


Yep, though we don't know what the field is. The cultures and lifestyles and opportunities between becoming a computer graphics artist or a web designer or a programmer are really different.



For work stuff, I do two things.

(1) I keep a text-file log of what I'm doing and trying and failing and succeeding. Usually with code snippets and output. These get very long but I split them up - they are really valuable to figure what the heck I was doing to make something work when I was in that rabbit hole. I use markdown in plain text - proprietary file formats and platforms come and go, over the decades.

(2) I keep a task list for each project or topic. As in "Getting Things Done" I write down all the steps to get something done, modify as things go. I started with https://www.taskpaper.com/ format years ago, but wrote my own programs to handle it within my text editor. I would probably do it in markdown nowadays, which is almost identical anyway. The top things I'm working on are in the @today or @p1 section - so if I get an interruptioin or urge to dive into a rabbit hole, I just make sure I have notes about where I was, then go down the hole... When I come out and wonder what the fark I was working on, it's still right there. So I'm not any more pleasant to deal with when I'm coming out of that deeply focused zone, but I do know where I was. Sometimes I get behind in notes and things feel kind of chaotic, it's an ebb and flow.

It looks like "rain man" to co-workers, and it is kind of an autistic way to deal with things... but they stop feeling it's weird when you can lay out the exact steps you did on a certain day to accomplish a thing, then it's kind of magic, and makes you much faster the second time or if you need to automate something.

Hope that helps you and the OP.

[quote=Nine7752]For work stuff, I do two things...[/quote]

+1 to this. If I'm going into a focused state for any length of time, lists and notes are essential because I will never remember things afterward. Worse, by trying to remember them I'll generate increasing stress for myself to the point that I can actually force myself into a shutdown. If you have established habits for keeping your lists and notes like Nine7752 uses then the practice will flow naturally and your lists will be complete.

12 hour days are brutal, but doing them in school teaches you that you can and helps you practice techniques for surviving them - like doing lists. Nobody, NT or ND, will be at their best under those conditions. When I went through that I found that I actually had a bit of an advantage if I could manipulate myself into obsessing over the subject matter. If I couldn't get myself to that point, though, it was a difficult slog. I also found that a bit of routine release once a week or so could help vent enough stress to keep me going. (Friday nights were frequently video-game sessions for me, then back into the homework on Saturday.)

I was also told to expect the same pace of work in my field, usually by professors or recent graduates that wanted to put me in my place. The reality was that the top 10% of the class went into jobs with that sort of schedule and many of them burned out about three years in, moving on to lower paying positions with more realistic schedules. I ended up in a track that occasionally had large overtime commitments, but those went away as I advanced. You and I are probably in different fields, but it is amazing how little of mine actually reflects the brutal hours my professors warned me about.

Just hang in there. One thing I've seen proven over and over, for NT and ND alike: whether you think you can't or you think you can, you're right.