In Other Words, I Like It

People keep asking me how the new job is going. I think this about sums it up:

Early Friday evening, I was pondering how much work to do and how much to leave for Saturday. Someone wisely reminded me this week that there will always be something in my inbox, so I shouldn't try to have everything done all the time. The "to-do" list will always have something left on it. Of course, that doesn't mean my list wasn't really long. Starting a new job usually means having too much to do for a while.

I decided instead of looking at how much I had left that I could do, I would count the number of hours I'd put in during the week. I couldn't really quit without my 40 hours, right? Excepting the 12 hours I'd spent finishing up the LSAT class I was still teaching, I arrived at 37.5. So really, I ought to put in 2.5 more hours between Friday and Saturday. Totally doable.

But then, I realized that this included 7 hours of work on Monday. And Monday was supposed to be a holiday. How, I wondered, would I ever have enough time to do all of my work in a regular week when I didn't have that "bonus" day to put in extra hours? Then I realized that Monday was a holiday. Meaning I didn't have to work it. Meaning I only had to work 32 hours this week. Meaning I was already over by 5.5 hours.

Of course the beauty of salaried work is that you still just do it, no matter how many hours it is. And I still did several hours of work Friday night. But I also felt just fine about the amount of work I'd done, no matter how long the to-do list remained.