Nearing burn-out

Just recently, i have come to the realisation that work has been taking over my life and i need to get a better balance. I've been really stressed recently because i've been given all sorts of new duties, including a new role of supervising a lady who is in her late 50's. She's kind of like an admin assistant who does a bit of project work. Anyway, it is stressful supervising her because she's not particularly great with computers and so a job that would normally take about 30 minutes to do, may take her about 2 hours and then when i go to check her work afterwards, she seems to miss portions of it, so a 30 minute job turns into about a 2.5 hour job... because i have to redo bits of it. Then there's the dilemna of her energy levels being quite different. By 3pm, she seems to lose her energy and i realise, it's better just to let her go home soon after, else i feel as though i am talking to a walking zombie.

Then another new duty involves doing complex queries in a program called Microsoft Acess in order to get data out of a huge database.... so, because i felt a little unprepared, i enrolled in uni lectures every Wednesday and Friday night in order to acquire the skills to get the data out.... that's two lectures outside of a more than full time job. Lectures require quite a bit of reading and assessments... [big sigh] ... so that really hasn't left much time. This week, i add another two lectures to make it four lectures a week.

The last few days, i've been feeling very strange because i've had occasional shooting chest pains, my abdomen feels like it is in knots and my head feels really fragile. Not like a headache, but just like something is frazzled. I think i'm taking on too much, and i need time off, but there's just so much to do. I guess having been tense for about four months straight now and having only had a few days off in this whole time, is all building up. Tomorrow, i am going to call in sick and just use the day to chill out. I just need it. I think i might do that Tuesday as well.