All work and no play...

Another beautiful day today and makes me wish that I wasn’t in a suit heading into the city.  We went for a picnic on Sunday at Euroka Clearing in the Glenbrook National Park and I have this desire to explore a lot of the park on foot.  Yee gods, I wouldn’t even mind doing a bit of camping!  (If you know me, you’ll know I am very much a hotel, clean sheets, restaurant kind of traveller).  I have been doing the odd bush walk lately around the bush near the house and have pretty much covered all the tracks there.  Then if you go to the south side of Glenbrook the National Park goes all the way to Warragamba Dam and you think “mmm, could you walk that far?”

But nope, it’s another day on the train and work beckons.  The train is full this morning and I have way too much work to do.  My working day now has truly extended to working on the train (no snoozing for this black duck) in both directions.  Reports to write, emails to draft, documents to review and then when you get to the office, its more of the same and things that crop up and are “urgent” and you need to do them straight away and yet you’re still expected to deliver the things you were going to do before the urgent stuff…

Australians they say are perhaps the hardest working people in the world.  The old stereo type of the Japanese salary man who basically lives in the office seems to have been passed over in favour of the Aussie worker who works the 9-5 hours, but tacks on 2 hrs at the beginning and the end of the day.  7am – 7pm is now the norm it seems.  My boss is in at 7:00am each morning… and yet doesn’t go home for 12 hrs.

For me personally I get in at 8:30, but apart from this blog, I work on the train.  In the evening, you don’t even think about leaving until 6:00 and invariably I am on the 7:00pm train home and am now working still.  So, this laptop is open from 7:15am to 8:40pm and yet I still feel like things don’t get done.

Maybe I will go for that walk….