Workaholics Are an Interesting Breed

I’m always surprised and very impressed with people who work extremely hard and put in an excessive amount of hours working at their job day after day with a relentlessness that most people would have trouble maintaining. It’s great when true passion is the driving force behind these work habits, and hopefully a lot of these people manage to balance out the other areas of their life to a point that works well for them. I can’t help but wonder about a couple of things though…For a person who works 10 or 12 hours a day and/or takes a lot of work home, when does he find time to take care of all the other details of daily life? And how does that person ever get enough sleep to function well? The other thing that perplexes me is people who have back-to-back meetings at work all day long with hardly any breathing room in between (this is common among managers in my office). How can that be efficient and productive in the long run? People usually need time to process discussions and notes from meetings that they attend, not to mention the follow-up task lists that are commonly generated from business meetings. When I have a lot of meetings filling my calendar, I get a little anxious about finding time to accomplish everything during the precious time in between. I work hard and take a lot of pride in the work that I do, but I wouldn't classify myself as a workaholic. I’ll leave that to the folks who really want to mold the majority of their life around their work.