Don't audit late into the night
If you stay up late to finish work, you may just get it done. But at what price?
You turn into some sort of 24 hour automaton.
Remember how to stop and relax, then do it.
One of the things I enjoy about my job is the flexible work schedule. Coming from a student journalism background, I'm well versed in the joy and pain of pulling an all-nighter to get things done once in a while.
The risk, of course, is that you'll wake up. Sort of. You'll be groggy, and you'll hit snooze and pass out for another hour. And whoever tried to wake you up will hear you muttering about what you were doing when you were awake. Like searching for super users in the application you were testing.
I wouldn't have thought of sharing this thought, since it's not all that interesting to me, except for the pure comedy of finding out you were spewing out jargon while asleep, until I read Dennis' points about the joys of blogging about the German ERP. And you'll know you had to be babbling jargon if the person waking you up almost thinks you're speaking a foreign language. And in this case, you just might as well have been, if you're using the software's original terminology.
Diving into new and exciting hidden corners SAP is some sort of never ending adventure. As with most facets of AuditLife, the moment you master one challenge, you're handed something brand new and increasingly more difficult. And if you really want to just "get it done," you might not necessarily want to call it a day at 5 pm. Or 9 pm.
Having pointed out that questionable habit, I checked my timesheets from last year and noticed I had even worse weeks, in terms of workload - so the fact that I'm balancing my workload slightly better is cause for celebration.
Now, to avoid working late into the night and turning into an IT audit zombie.