That's me! photo from the official community announcement about my new job. I got this week to wrap up my stuff and starting my real work week on Monday :) One thing that I hope i'll manage ok is my schedule. I'm supposed to be working 30h/week. Maybe for you productive peeps it seems like no big deal, but I haven't had a real job in YEARS. And since i've been time-tracking my stuff, I know I only get 4-5 good hours a day. My other time is spent doing home maintenance things, seeing friends and generally mucking around on the internet. I hope I'm just wasting too much time doing nothing and this job will just make me more organized and mindful with my time - not make me stressed and sacrifice things I enjoy doing. Time will tell! Exited to try this new chapter :)
Congratulations on your new job! It's very common for many people in full time "knowledge work" positions to only spend 4-5 hours on "real work" and to feel self-conscious about that. Especially with everything going on in the world, that's a completely reasonable amount of effort to expect from anyone.
Good to know! Since i'm expected to manage my own schedule, and I can do a lot of the work at home - the issue becomes the amount of hours I "count" as work-related. Because If it were a regular 9-5 job, the 20 minutes spent making coffee or talking to a coworker counts as working hours. I have friends who spend their "work-time" planning their next vacation (admittedly they work for the government). But if I only count the hours I'm TRULY working, 30h/week can become a lot quickly. Hopefully I'll have some long mindless stuff to fill the time a little.
WOOHOO! Congratulations, Elizabeth!! I'm excited for you. My suggestion is to make a note of everything you do. I personally use workflowy.com which is a browser-based outliner tool. I simply enter the date and day of the week, and then leave that browser window open all day. Every time I do something, I make a note of it. At the end of the day, I transfer the To Do items to tomorrow's list, and collapse today. At the end of the week, I open up all 5 of the days and read through everything I did that week. It takes no time to enter things. It takes 5 minutes to review at the end of the week. But the FEELING OF ACCOMPLISHMENT I get from it is incredibly invigorating. I've complained on Hubski a lot about how "easy" my job is, and how "little" I do, and how I feel like I might be a free-loader and not worth my salary... so I always feel like I am on the edge of being fired. When I started doing this SUPER simple logging process, I suddenly realized how much I do, how important it is to the company and my co-workers, and have learned to properly value myself, my skills, and the role I play at my company. So that's my suggestion. Keep a daily log of everything you do. Just for yourself. It helped me a lot.