I've been absolutely hammered over the last week. I started work on Monday in my client's office and boy! am I out of practice working during normal business hours. I hadn't realised just how much writing I do at unsocial hours. Sometimes I'm awake at 5am and writing, at other times I'm still up at 1am. This week I've been up at 7am and back from work around 7pm and the...well...normality...is driving me mad. And I haven't even managed to get into the office at 9am yet, I've been a slacker and started at 10:15. It literally takes me a solid hour and three quarters to get sorted in the morning before I'm out to catch the bus and then the train. I literally have a checklist of everything I have to do and tick it off, even down to brushing my teeth. Christ five years ago I used to be able to get up, get showered, dressed, put my make up on, make lunch, eat breakfast and leave the house for work in 30 minutes flat. It was automatic.
What the hell has happened to me?!
It's not laziness. When I'm writing in the flow, I can focus all day and not move. In fact, the longest writing stint I did recently was 13 hours and it just didn't feel like work. Maybe working at home has made me a bit soft around the edges. I can get up and write in my dressing gown and shower and brush my teeth later. My routine happens, just at a slow pace spread out over several hours. I'd forgotten that going to work means compressing all that down into a chunk of time where you move swiftly from one thing to the next and leave the house at the same time every day.
Bizarrely, the biggest shock to the system is being back to working with people with all their jokes and coughs and weird ticks and habits. Even when everyone's quiet and not saying anything I can still hear them, their presence is really loud. It's like I can hear their auras floating around the room. I'm having to work hard to shut out everything around me before I even start work.
Also, the last time I worked in an office I was used to having 3/4 of my brain focused on the computer and the other 1/4 keeping track of all the conversations and phonecalls that were happening. It was important that everyone was so up-to-date on every detail about every project that anyone could pick up the phone and talk to the client. There was no passing something to a colleague. You picked up the phone, you dealt with what was on the end of it. When someone went on holiday, the gap was naturally filled by everyone. At my clients' everyone deals with their own clients and their own jobs, yet my brain is trying to desperately sift through information I hear to put things into order and make sense of the client relationship and projects just in case I need to deal with something. Just in case some time in the remote future that important client rings up in a terrible state and needs an answer now and I'm the only one there to help.
It's going to take a while for me to switch that mechanism off. It feels really weird to have to do it. Maybe that's my perfectionism rearing it's head again.