Exhaustion

Exhaustion
I'm physically exhausted from work and continuous sleep deprivation...you know it's bad when you hit 40 hours a week in three days (including Sunday). This job isn't a sprint, it's a marathon, and I'm the sucker looking for the next runner to give the baton to, and I'm barefoot, running on hot coals, wearing an itchy wool sweater, and panting like a pre-teen at an NSync concert. You probably want to know what's keeping me up at night..there are a bunch of upcoming exec reviews for VS '05 and they require a tremendous amount of work and coordination. I have a backlog of Pri 1 tasks I simply don't have time to do, and I only blog to escape the horror of my reality. 

Fighting for what you believe in
My other problem is that I passionately believe in a product decision and I'm “going to the mat” as Joe would say to try and defend it. It's a losing battle right now and I don't think I'll be able to stop the train (it'll run right over me), but I have to try. At Microsoft you definitely need to pick your battles, because you can't have *everything*. Sometimes though, you just need to fight a fight because it's what you believe in, no matter how badly the odds are stacked against you. That's me, right now, 8:02PM PST in my office, no dinner, no sleep and over 400 pages of PowerPoint slide decks in front of me. Hopefully this post will make sense sometime at the end of this year, but I'll let you know if I'm even standing next Friday :).

In the chaos of discussing how busy we were today, Goldfarb made me cackle out loud with this quote “I need to S+ a 1:1 with God to talk about extending the work day”. Maybe you have to work @ MS, but I thought that was hilarious, but then again it's probably just sleep deprivation.