This past week, I think something in me broke. I started off the week by pushing myself hard Monday and Tuesday, but on Wednesday I felt completely run down and lost all motivation. Thursday was bad too...I accomplished more on Monday alone than on Wednesday and Thursday put together. I spent more time talking to people than I did actually taking data and updating problem summaries. Of course, one of my coworkers back in Rochester does that about 75% of his bare-minimum working hours, so I shouldn't feel bad at all. Seems to me that I've got a lot of unreasonable expectations placed on my shoulders, so I can drop my output for a few days.

Actually, when one gets burned out, it's a downward spiral: your output starts to drop, so you have to work longer hours to make up, leading to further decrease in efficiency. When I was coming to Fujisawa on business trips, I could handle 60-70 hr weeks for the duration, about three weeks at a pop. (My best was 100 hrs in 7 straight days, but that ended up in a huge technical win that was probably a big contributor to my promotion.) I've worked mostly 60+ hr weeks for the past couple months, and I've hit a wall. So I say 60 hrs or whatever, but because I've been doing it for so long, I catch myself staring at my laptop screen sometimes, not parsing the glyphs on the screen. The amount of time I spend zoned out due to fatigue, or talking doom and gloom with other guys here has gone up, so maybe the real amount of work I can get done is down 10-15%. My Japanese skills have even plummeted lately. I just can't find the words to say what I want to say.

What's wrong with white-collar "professionals" these days, when we have to brag about how many hours we worked? Really, it's how many hours we spend at work. Yet lately I've been bringing my laptop home and working some more, so the amount of time I attempt to spend on work is probably 5-8 hrs additional, dropping my sleep time accordingly. Argh, I can't stop....

Thursday I met a couple guys from San Jose via the SJ gentleman (G.S.) I was providing code support for. One, S.L., was a 2nd-line manager, formerly from "Quaxtor", as we call it (Quantum, then Maxtor when Q got out of HDDs). He acted like a 2nd-line, being very curt and to the point. One feature I worked on demo'ing he was very keen on, as well as doing some further optimization to improve yield. He wanted to push them with the programs here, but there's been some resistance in a certain division. I had pushed for these in the past, and although was deferred, I can understand he point of view of the people here. He just doesn't get it; you can't deal with the Japanese the same way as you can Americans. Such changes require broad acceptance across multiple departments and support from management. If we had the 4th-line's support plus technical backing, then that would be something. Anyway, it's good to have face-time with management in SJ, which is company headquarters, because my name gets on reports for studies conducted here, as more often than not I end up helping SJ folks out with new technology evaluation. The other guy I met was M.S., a well-grounded technical guy and a straight-shooter. G.S., M.S., H.L., and I all went out to an okonomiyaki restaurant in Shonandai for dinner. M.S. did a lot of talking, especially about Asian politics. He's of Korean decent, and the other two guys are Chinese, so H.L. joked that we had the whole Pacific Rim represented. Now that I'm an adult, I appreciate my Asian background a bit more.

When I got home after dinner—having left work far earlier than usual for dinner—I crashed hard. I just passed out on the living room floor. I got 8 hrs of sleep that night, just like normal people. It felt good. Too bad I'm not hyperkinetic or something, because wasting one third of my day sleeping seems like a huge waste. I guess I'm too old now to get away with 4-5 hrs a night. I'll just have to make my days more efficient to compensate. Time management is the key to success.

So my current pattern of living is clearly broken. Change is in the air.