I'm burned out, but my baked goods aren't!

Sadly, it seems that Despair, Inc's designs are not covered by the good ol' Creative Commons license, but I'd ask you all to take a moment to check out this de-motivational poster for a sense of where I'm at today.

Funny stuff, eh?

To be fair, I'm not quite to that point yet, but I am feeling pretty exhausted. One of the women in my office will be going on maternity leave soon, and I'll be covering many of her duties while she's gone. Fortunately, someone else in my office will then be covering many of my duties, so I shouldn't be stuck entirely in the situation of trying to do two jobs at once. It's a really great opportunity for me, and in many ways I'm really excited for it. I'll get a chance to work in some areas that I'm not currently involved in and fill in some gaps that I feel are missing on my resume right now. But with any new challenge comes new stresses, and the weight of all of those new challenges is suddenly hitting me. I'm also in the midst of training for that position, organizing training materials and training the person who will be covering much of my work, and trying to do all of my regular work at the same time. Yesterday I sat down and plotted out all of my meetings and training times on my calendar, and I discovered that I have about 4 hours free in the next week--to do 35+ hours of work. Yikes.

It certainly doesn't help matters that I'm a bit of a workaholic. Even without all of this crazy added stress, I'm usually at work much later than I need to be. And to some degree, this is pretty common in my field, but I absorb much more work stress than is healthy. I need to find a way to A. be more efficient while I'm at work and B. learn to tell my supervisors when I've reached my limits (instead of smiling and saying "No problem, I'm not sure when I'll have time for this, but I'll make it happen.")

All of this stress has led to a near explosion of baked goods in my kitchen. Some people stress eat. I am one of them. But in particular, I get cravings for baked goods, and homemade is always better than store-bought. So apparently I also stress bake. In the past two weeks, I've made two pans of brownies (one was tonight, so they should last a bit yet), peanut butter chip cookies (those went to work, so we were saved from ourselves), and a batch of butterscotch/chocolate chip cookies. We are suddenly remarkably low on chocolate chips, butter, eggs, and flour. I'm not sure how that happened...

If you're looking for a good brownie recipe, I would highly recommend these Extreme Chocolate Brownies, which I made tonight. The first step is a little putzy, but not hard, I promise. (Okay, third step I guess. If preheating the oven and greasing the pan are too difficult for you, please put down the recipe and go buy some brownies in the bakery at your local grocery store.)

How do you deal with work stress? Any tips to share? Or any recipes for chocolate baked goods?