Something has come up lately, not from my supervisor or his, but from my own awareness of what's going on with my ability to work at the pace which I feel that I need to in order to keep up with things.
To give a brief account I hold an auditing position, we work with many companies within our state as well as several neighboring states in reviewing their payables, finding errors, contacting vendors, and getting money back to our clients. Part of this is pouring over data, occasionally data management can even become a heavy task when the number of small overpayments or refunds due your looking at ranges in the hundreds. You can also tack on adult baby-sitting when you call the vendors and for enough of them you can leave emails, voice mails, and get little response.
While I've always had executive functioning strain in the past I was able to get over it by just drinking way too much coffee and kicking the s--- out of myself if I felt like my performance was coming up short. Wasn't good for my long term health but, being new, I figured that it had to get easier. In the last three months I hit a point where, as is often, I'll go through a seasonal change where my sympathetic nervous system feels utterly wrecked, as if someone had just tazed the heck out of me. It was bad enough a few months ago that I decided that I needed to cut out the caffeine. Now, I'm at a point where yes, i feel much healthier, but I'm also noticing that my ability for mental workload is very low. Its not that I don't have the intelligence to do the work that I'm doing, I understand what it is and what needs to be done, but I fatigue so fast that I feel as though I'm barely accomplishing anything. Yes, I can effectively be my own worst bully and take a beating on myself but, as I've left my mid 20's I learned that this is a habit that - yes - buys some short term accomplishment but then in trade-off batters my nervous system, weakens my neural integrity so that social situations become more difficult, and the obvious - it takes both quality of life, both internal and external as well as hope for the for the future, down a few notches.
The thing that's worried me about this job, if I ever felt like I needed to move on because of this, I don't know what else I'd be good at or where the same problems wouldn't simply crop up over again. I don't see myself being fired on performance, though admittedly its quite stressful when you're stuck in a position of having your work being passably sub-par and sitting on the edge of sub-par. I have a BBA in Accounting, graduated with highest honors, the trouble that was addressed as well on a neurological appraisal I had a few years back is that my working memory is very low. We have yearly quotas, I made mine this year, I know that I could do ok next year although I find it doubtful that I'd hit my mark as most of this job is chance and there is a lot that's changing n our industry - whether its the availability of recovery items or the increasing games that are getting played on us between clients and vendors.
So I'm trying to figure out - before I'm really stuck at a cross-roads and have to make a split second decision, who else has been here and been able to solve the issue with a positive outcome? If you have similar issues with working memory and work in a professional field, have you found a certain type of position or job responsibility that makes truce at a point that's healthy for you on an ongoing basis? I'm curious to see what my options are as well as, if I do decide to go back for more education, how that awareness may shape future choices in something like a graduate degree.
22 Nov 2010, 12:20 pm
