Days 40-44: Feeling more comfortable
Emotions
Overall, I was pretty happy throughout the week. I generally enjoyed what I was doing day-to-day, had some good challenges that helped me grow, and some great meetings. I’m finally started to feel an ounce of comfort in this new role and starting to get a little rhythm. Metaphorically, I would equate this feeling of comfort to something like reading through a bug, knowing where in the code to look, dissecting the problem, and solving the problem. And it’s not just a matter of being able to do this, it’s a matter of doing it enough to not feel as stressed out doing it. Happiness and comfort aside, there was definitely still stress, this time mostly from going through some new experiences.
Tasks
I didn’t have quite as many meetings as the previous week but still plenty enough of them to keep me occupied. Since we are transitioning between milestones, I had these new experiences this week:
Bucketizing features for upcoming milestones and discussing them with my leadership team
Getting pulled into planning meetings with internal partner teams
Starting to think about solid resourcing plans for what features we are going to work on next
This is something I haven’t really mentioned before but for the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve been getting a lot out of my 1:1s with my new manager. We’ve had some great general discussions and I’ve been able to positively change my perspective on certain situations because of it. It’s been really valuable to put in the time to make a list of topics for discussion to make effective use of that precious 1:1 time.
Learnings
After having that packed week of meetings, I had some more time to reflect on that during this less busy (meeting-wise) week. I’m realizing more and more that I can’t tell myself that I’m not being productive on days where I’m in meetings all day - I’m still contributing and adding value by going to these meetings. I also know that if I’m not directly contributing and just need to be there to listen, that’s fine too and I can get some other work done on the side. This is helping me feel better about the work I’m doing and making my contributions feel a little more tangible. I personally find it difficult to feel really productive in meetings even if I’m able to contribute a lot to the conversation just because I’m used to my definition of “productive” being more tangible like fixing bugs or coding features. I’m happy to be understanding this more week after week so I don’t end up burning myself out by putting in an extraordinary amount of time just because I have meetings.
Aside from this, I’m still learning to roll with the punches on all the new experiences that come with being a manager. How to handle some things are becoming more clear while other situations are very much unclear. I just need to keep an open mind, make my mistakes, learn from them, and get better!
