Everyone
knows about jet lag, and indeed, I’ve spent much of this week up close and
personal with it – falling asleep at odd hours, unable to stay awake past 9pm,
etc. But it’s the trip lag that hits me the hardest.
Let me explain that.
Meetings
in my organization are intense – really intense. I mentioned in my last post
how one of my far-flung colleagues described her first meeting as like ‘getting
plugged into the Matrix’, which describes it better than I ever could. I have
felt this way since my first one back in 1999, a month after I started, and the
feeling has only increased as I’ve logged more time in the organization, and as
my life around my job has changed – especially becoming a parent and moving
away from Oxford, one of the busiest centers of organizational activity. When I
lived in Oxford, I was in regular, often daily, face-to-face contact with
people that I worked with; now I spend most of my working days in a home
office, with most of my colleagues halfway across the world, sound asleep while I’m working and vice
versa. I schedule my working hours around school runs, meal prep, and evening
conference calls when the Europeans and North Americans are online. Most of the
people I encounter in my daily round here require a five-minute explanation of
who I work for and what we do, if it even comes up in conversation.
Then,
once or twice a year, I head off to a meeting. For a week or more, I’m with my
colleagues – many of whom are also friends – day and night. We talk about work
stuff – by choice! – most of the time, along with whatever else we feel like
catching up on. We resolve nagging problems, brainstorm ideas, share anecdotes
and gossip, plan projects. We use acronyms and spout jargon. My biggest
concerns are making all my meetings, getting access to the venue wifi, and
finding a good place to have dinner.
Then
it’s over. Time to unplug, trek home, and slot back into the daily routine of a
working parent. Time to pick up on all the things that got pushed on to the
back burner during trip prep and now need doing – filing tax returns, decluttering
the storage area, catching up with school permissions slips, scheduling dentist
appointments. Time to resume all the routine work tasks that need doing, as
well as all the fun stuff that you’ve just been discussing. I freely admit
these are first-world problems, but it does cause a little bit of a crash, and
can lead to loss of oomph in a variety of areas.
That’s
trip lag. I haven’t worked out the average recovery period yet – it seems to
vary from meeting to meeting. I reckon it took me two weeks or more after
Auckland. I’ve been back from Oxford since Sunday, and it’s still going strong.
My main coping strategy is to find ways to reward myself for doing things I
have no burning desire to do (like clean up my email backlog) with things I do
want to do (like cooking projects).
Today,
having completed a four-day week that nevertheless seemed longer than usual, I
celebrated the start of the long Easter weekend by beginning prep for the
brunch I’m hosting on Sunday (much smaller than last year’s, I might add!). I
spent most of the day making tarrale, and also remembered to hard-boil some
eggs for a dyeing session with Miss B.
Maybe
things are looking up after all.
