I came home from work tonight feeling the way I used to feel 36 hours into an all-nighter back in college. Except that I slept for 8 hours or so last night. My brain is completely drained. I am not normally a project manager, my title at the day job being a senior application developer. But I find myself managing two projects right now, a small one about which I have been excited for a while. And a large one, which I inherited last week from a far more capable project manager who left to pursue other opportunities. In addition, I am developer on a third project, a lead technical consultant on a fourth, a team member of a fifth. My days, recently, have been all about churn. Fifteen minutes of this, twenty minutes of that, ten minutes of this other thing.

Today, I spent six hours in meetings, and the remaining time preparing for them. It’s been like this for a week or so now. My days have been long, and when you add in the writing in the evenings, they have been even longer. I think I set a personal record earlier this week. RescueTime told me that I’d spent 18 hours on the computer in a single day!

Tonight, my writing was uninspired. I don’t feel much like reading, or even listening to an audiobook. My brain has reached its capacity. I need to disconnect and allow it to cool off a bit. So I am going to try to take the weekend off. I’ll still get in my writing–after 627 consecutive days it is unthinkable not to write. But I may take a break from fiction this weekend and write two nonfiction pieces that I’ve been meaning to write for some time now. It will give me a well-needed break from fiction. And nonfiction is easier on my brain than fiction, so that’s an added bonus.

I am also going to try to stay offline for the most part this weekend. I’m not going to read much. Instead, I’m going to something I don’t do often: sit in front of the TV and watch episodes of Magnum, P.I. and M*A*S*H. Hopefully, by Monday, I’ll feel more like my 2015-self, and less like the 1992-sleep-deprived college version of myself.

Have a great weekend!