The importance of a day off

One of the pitfalls of this looking-for-work malarkey is that you can just end up trying too damn hard, while always feeling you're not doing enough (otherwise you'd have a job by now, right?). I used to tell my housemate to have a day off, properly - no 'just one email' - or she would burn out.

And yet, here I am on 'holiday', glued to the laptop I lugged up to Scotland with me, checking my emails first thing and feeling miserable, defeated and overwhelmed.

I am switching the computer off, putting it back in the suitcase, where it stays until I get home.

Guest blog: The Ones Left Behind

A new, thoughtful perspective, from a friend who has just taken redundancy - he writes his own blog at One Small Thing which is well worth checking out - writing is certainly amongst his many talents.

There are things that you know to expect when you are made redundant – or at least, things that you’ve been told to expect. About the process of adjusting to not working, and not having an income. But there are also things that you don’t really expect. For example…

One of the principal things I’ve felt during the lead-up to redundancy is concern for my colleagues. Not the ones that are leaving with me, although obviously I do, but more unexpectedly for the ones that are staying.

The thing is, these are people that I have worked with for a number of years, people I’ve grown fond of. And the workplace I’m leaving behind is not going to be a very nice place to be in the near future. There are going to be a lot less people doing the work, but the expectations of the customers are not going to be lowered.

We’ve tried, those of us going, to train up the survivors as best we can, but it’s not easy when management won’t decide on the type of service that they want. Not that there would be enough time to do it properly in any case. So there’s a gap – between what the customer wants, and what the re-shaped service will be able to provide.

And of course, it’s the staff who will bear the brunt of it – the moans and the complaints – at the same time as trying to cope with a massively increased workload and a lot of new tasks that they haven’t been adequately prepared for.

To be honest, towards the end I was thinking that I was one of the lucky ones – despite the lack of income and the uncertain future. And that’s something I really wasn’t expecting.