At some point, we will all be guilty of feeling as if all we do is work, work, work. For many of us, we don't have a choice because we really need the money to help us pay off debts or whatever the cause may be. But the irony lies in the fact that many of us devote so much time to working for a living when in fact, we don't ever get to experience the “living” part. Think about it. You go to work each day so that you can get a paycheck. You then take that paycheck and pay off your bills and hopefully you have enough money left over that you can do something for yourself and/or your loved ones. However, you can't because you don't have the time or aren't being allowed the time to do so.



Many companies will allow their employees a certain amount of time for “vacation” after they have been working there for a certain amount of time. However, there has been much speculation over the idea of when employees should be allowed to take vacation as well as for how long. For example, if an employee is new to a company and hasn't missed a single day of work and has been doing an outstanding job on his or her work for the first sixty days, should he or she be allowed at least one or two freebies? I'm not saying that after only working for a company for one or two months that they should be allowed to take off on a three-week vacation, but would it be so out of the question to allow them to go home early once or twice?

Jobs can creep up and take over your life, often without you even realizing it until it is too late. We often follow the pattern of: wake up, breakfast, work, go home, dinner, bed. How sad is that? Too often, I have had friends or seen other people in situations where they want to go out and enjoy themselves, but they can't because they have to go in to work on a Saturday to finish up work. If anything, I think that the workweek should be shortened to four days a week versus five or at least make the days shorter for the five day work week. Working too much or too hard, like anything in athletics, is bound to catch up with you and wear you out. Before you know it, you have little energy to do much of anything else.

When I worked for the police department, I would come off of a night shift at 7 in the morning, go straight to meet up with a friend for a run and then go home, eat and sleep the entire day until it was time to go to work. On my days off, because I was accustomed to the night schedule, I found that I was up when most people were in bed. On my other days off during other shifts, I was discovering that I was too worn out to do much of anything else with anyone. It was depressing, and I eventually came to resent my job, citing that it simply wasn't worth it to receive a paycheck every couple of weeks but have no quality of life.