This is how today went:

8:05 arrive at office. Unpack bag, switch on computer, make tea.
8:20 sit at desk with tea. Read emails.
8:45 decide I should probably stop ignoring the emails telling me my password is about to expire. Spend ten minutes trying to think of a new password that conforms to the rules but that I can also (a) remember and (b) type.
9:00 multiple apps pop up notifications saying I need to log in again. Try new password. New password refuses to work. Give up and go to buy coffee.
9:15 get back with coffee. Drink coffee. Log in to multiple apps with new password which now works.
9:30 ring someone for brief chat about potential temp.
9:45 go to say hello to team. Spend 15 minutes talking to new office manager about various things.
10:10 stop on the way back from saying hello to team to ask most vulnerable colleague if she wants people to wear masks in in-person meeting. Spend 15 minutes catching up about various things.
10:30 regular senior staff meeting.
11:30 go and make more tea
11:40 sit down and start working through email. Remember I need to read papers for meeting at 2. Skim-read papers while also keeping an eye on inbox.
12:45 go and have lunch. Manage brief walk in parks.
1:45 get back from lunch. Answer teams message.
2:00 committee meeting.
3:15 committee meeting ends, teams call with another person who was in the meeting because we had arranged to talk afterwards.
3:30 look at email.
3:45 realise I need a wee. Decide to make tea while I'm up.
4:00 get back to desk with tea, contemplate actual work that needs to be done. Also contemplate state of utter exhaustion which I have already reached.
4:10 person turns up wanting a quick word about something. By the time they go, tea is cold.
4:30 drink cold tea. Have several parallel teams message conversations about various things while trying to write an email.
4:45 send email. Start reviewing documents which have to be submitted by tomorrow.
5:15 submit documents. Write and send another email. Start reading papers for meeting tomorrow morning.
5:30 person sticks head round door to say goodbye and catch up quickly on stuff that's happened today.
5:35 go back to meeting papers.
6:10 finish skim reading 153 pages of meeting papers for 10am tomorrow. Realise I'm not going to catch 6:20 bus. Spend 20 minutes on email.
6:30 stagger out of door and in direction of bus stop.

And this is not actually an atypical day...

I turned off my work laptop, came downstairs and turned on my personal laptop, and sat there wondering if I really was tired enough for everything to look so blurry. And then I realised I was wearing my seeing-things-other-than-computers glasses and not my seeing-computers glasses. (Juggling two pairs of glasses is, quite frankly, a massive pain in the arse.)

I am tired enough that it didn't seem impossible that that could be making everything look blurry. I had such grand plans for the things I would do with the two weeks between the end of term and the Christmas break, and obviously I haven't actually done most of them and am just crawling through the last few meetings and wishing I could just go back to bed. (I actually went for a PCR test yesterday because I was feeling so tired and headachy, but it was negative, so I think it's just end-of-term exhaustion.)

Only one more day to get through...

Today I have mostly been feeling tired and listless. Which is not exactly surprising, even without having been woken up at 7am by a cramping calf muscle.

I resent having to spend my weekends recovering from the working week. I did go for a swim, and have made a bit of sewing progress, but not nearly as much as I would have liked...

It is the end of the weekend and I'm not sure I'm any less tired than I was at the start of it. I feel flat and sad and would rather like to just go to bed and stay there for a while, but also to be somewhere different and not in the same place I've been in for very nearly all of the last 15 months.

Possibly I shouldn't have listened to the latest series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme twice in the last week. It is utterly brilliant, and really needs a careful second listen (essentially, it's like a Kate Atkinson novel a radio comedy sketch show, with all the sketches building up a complicated story that only really makes sense at the end), and there were bits which made me chortle with glee when I was listening, but I don't think it's helped the melancholy mood really.

Five more days at work, and then I have a week off and no more five-day weeks until the middle of September.

I've read far fewer books over the last year than I would normally have done. Partly, I think that's to do with losing the reading time I'd usually have on my commute (though I've been trying to make up for that by reading a bit first thing in the morning and at lunchtime), but I've also been struggling to focus on the words. I thought maybe it was to do with stress and anxiety, and I just wasn't managing to keep the rest of my brain calm enough to focus. Which wouldn't be entirely surprising, given everything right now, but has meant that I've been taking a long time to finish books and my TBR pile is getting rather out of control.

Recently, I've found myself managing to read more, and even to read a bit faster (though it's still been more like one book every two weeks rather than at least one book a week), which I thought was a hopeful sign. Alas, for the last couple of days my eyes have gone back to just sliding off the page rather than taking in the words, but actually, I think I know why: I'm just too tired to focus, rather than being too anxious, or too stressed.

I suppose the answer to "how do I make myself less tired?" is probably "work less". Which seems so simple when you just say it like that...