Sick days

I spent the better part of last week sick and as a result, I wasn't able to do any of my daily exercise and writing or any work that wasn't an urgent (and easy to fulfill) client request. Today is a new week though, and although I'm not quite up to exercising again, I'm feeling good enough to write and get back to something that resembles a normal workday.

These past days though made me reflect on how I've thought about sick days from work over the course of my life and work experience. And really it comes down to two factors: how difficult it is to catch up from missed time and how important the perception that others have of you missing time is. So if we start from the beginning in school as an example, sick days were something that you felt no guilt about, since you had an approved reason to be home and the work was easy enough that you could catch up in a couple of days time. Moving on to college, you might push yourself a bit more since the work was more challenging and you didn't want to fall behind, but there was still not much external pressure from others to turn up to class if you were unwell.

Then once I was in an entry-level corporate job, there wasn't yet a ton of work you were responsible for that you would have to make up. But there were a lot of people observing what you were doing, so the focus moved a lot to the perception. I remember in these days, I really wanted to push for as many days off as I could, but it all depended on what I thought I could convince my manager of.

Later on in corporate life, there was still a lot of concern about how you're perceived but you also have a ton of work that will leave you buried if you take too many days off. I remember lots of days during this period working in the office when I was way too sick to be there. (I hope this culture has changed a bit in corporate jobs in post-covid times)

Finally, that brings us up to now where I'm working for myself running my solo business. The main work that I'm missing out on is long-term investment in product and growth that I'd loving to be doing if I were feeling well, but pushing back a few days doesn't mean I have to rush to catch up. And there's no one that I need to prove anything to about how hard I'm working. So, really it was surprisingly un-stressful taking all the days I needed to properly recover. I say surprisingly, because there's this stereotype of a business owner as someone who can never take any time off. But really, it all depends on how you structure your business and how it can work without you on a daily basis.