Keeping Up

About four years ago I attended a conference on web-based learning in San Francisco. One of the speakers gave a presentation on the future and how it was going to speed up. He gave us an experience of that and it was quite mind-boggling.

Well, the past few weeks I have come to realize just how all that was true and how I am now living it. Around that time I was working for Canon and assigned a project to develop 60 minutes of a web-based training program. I was given and took about 8 months to write and storyboard it out.

In the past couple weeks I had 5 days to write a similar 60 minute web-based training program, storyboarded it out, not quite to the extent of the other. It was reviewed and approved in 2 days, then the team of media producers did voice recording and built the course in Flash and it went out to the client to review. So in a matter of about 14 days it was put together. It felt good, I felt a sense of accomplishment -- but also tired because it did take some late nights. Is it good to be going at this pace??

I don't have the answer. I did have a mini-melt down the next day, not so much about what I had accomplished, but that there was no time to take a step back and re-group, for I had to go on to the next two projects, knowing that I still have several hours of potential edits to do on the course out to review. I want to feel that I can expand and do it all, but what are my realities of how much of this can I do or should be expected of me. My brain functionality is compromised right now because of the lack of sleep and lack of time to re-group. Am I whinng and undermining my potential or am I trying to protect myself from a potentially abusive situation?