📆 31.05.21 – 04.06.21 📆
To whoever is reading this
People would always tell me I needed a better work-life balance. I used to just brush it off. Ive always worked hard for everything – I was never one of those people that ‘naturally did well at school.’ I had to put in the hours.
At GCSE, I took pro plus to get 10A*s.
At A-Level, I didn’t leave my house for months on end to get 3 A*.
At Uni, I lived on bubble tea as a substitute for meals as I didn’t have time to cook, let alone eat. You can imagine how well that turned out.
After uni I realized that I could have worked half as hard and gotten the same grades, I just needed to change how I worked. Take more breaks. Have a routine. Make sure I had a healthy lifestyle etc.
So I don’t know why when I started work, I went back to my old habits. It’s easy to blame everything on the C word — Working from home has made it a lot easier to work over time. Take out the 3 hour commute each day, I found myself not leaving my room for days. I would wake up at 5, start work at 6, finish at 11 and do it all again.
I would look forward to the weekends and bank holidays. Not for a break but because I knew I’d be able to send out emails and I wouldn’t get a response. It gave me a chance to ‘catch up’ on everything, and by that, I mean do everything. When you start working in a law firm, you need to time record everything you do. I am the most competitive person you will ever meet, I like to beat my own ‘high score’ with time recording…super healthy, I know.
The trouble is, when you’re working and sending emails at all hours of the night, people start expecting you to be available 24/7.
It’s important to have a good balance for your mental health as well as physical. That’s why I didn’t take my numb feet seriously in the beginning – putting it down to my unhealthy lifestyle. I think now, more than ever, we need to be able to distance ourselves from work. I give myself a cut off point, mute my notifications and try not to think about it until the next day. If I can’t, well, I’ll probably just have a rant on here instead ☺️
Legally Correct 