Days 45-49: Not quite as planned
Emotions
Overall, my week was great. Not as many meetings (except for Wednesday), good progress made on quite a few items, and I felt like I was able to be generally helpful for other people. Friday was a pretty stressful day, I had very few meetings and had a list of stuff I wanted to get done but had to throw some of it out the window to put out some fires. I feel like my relationship with my team is slowly getting better as slow as it may be with everyone working remotely.
Tasks
I had some great planning meetings this week and was able to contribute to the design for a few different features. With the upcoming milestone being my first full milestone as a lead, I’m happy with where I’m at and the progress I’m making. My Wednesday was packed with meetings with only about 1 hour to spare between 9 AM and 6 PM. Friday was overall a pretty stressful day with a whole slew of issues, coming one after another in quick succession. I had to do some multi-tasking throughout the day, jumping from call to call to understand what was going on and how to help remediate.
This week I also started building a better strategy for tracking my work. In the past, I’ve gotten away with writing things down on sticky notes, creating pages in OneNote, or sending emails to myself. While my random system has been working until now, this week it just wasn’t cutting it. I’ve started actually using a to-do application, creating tasks for myself, and scheduling them for specific days. Even though I get zero satisfaction from checking a checkbox in a list to say “I’m done” with whatever that task is, I feel it’s becoming more necessary for me to track everything better.
Learnings
As an IC, I baked in a lot of randomization into my schedule organically. As you get further in your career as an IC, you naturally have to account for more randomization since your scope will continue increasing and more people will rely on your help. Being a lead now, I’m not quite at the same point of taking into account all my other randomizations and I feel like the scope is not the same. Now, I might get randomized for technical help, help finding resources, or help with personal situations. And that’s just the surface of possibilities. The scope feels larger and can be more urgent - I’ll need to adjust to this over time. The hard part is that this experience isn’t something I can truly simulate, I’ll just need to stay alert, make my mistakes, and keep learning and improving.
