Days 50-54: Stressful days and nights

Emotions

This week had a lot of work-related stress, both during the work day and after the work day. It also had its fair share of happy moments where I was able to get a lot of fulfillment by being involved in an extremely varied set of meetings throughout the week. There was a lot going on and I unfortunately lost a good amount of sleep thinking about my team, my team’s future work, and my future work. This was the first week since being quarantined where I really started to feel frustrated at the state of the world and longed to go back to the office.

Tasks

Tons of meetings this week, somewhere between 3.5 and 4 full days solid. The meeting discussions varied a lot - this was plus/minus for me. On the one hand, I really loved the feeling of being involved in so many different meetings. On the other hand, switching topics over and over again is really mentally taxing and I definitely felt that.

I did a good amount of planning for future work and was able to make good progress. I’m starting to put the puzzle pieces together to figure out what items each person on my team should work on and trying to align as best as I can with career goals and growth opportunities. I spent a lot of time just thinking about different options for how to pair certain people up or how to split up work - this thinking seeped into my evenings and kept me up late a few nights. It means I care but I need to do a better job of keeping my work/life separation as much as possible.

Since I’ve become a lead and since everyone switched to working remotely because of the state of the world, I haven’t done as much 1:1 mentoring as I did in the past. I got the chance to catch up with a co-worker this week and have a generally casual conversation but also do a little bit of mentoring. It was a good reminder of why I enjoy mentoring so much and it was great to have that casual connection in the midst of all the craziness.

Learnings

I’ve probably mentioned this in another post before but this week really enforced the importance of work/life balance. And it’s not just a matter of dividing up the time that you’re actively working and the time you’re not. It’s also about understanding the impact that thinking about work or talking about work can have on your personal life. At the end of the week, I was exhausted because I was staying up late thinking about work for most of the week. Working from home for this extended period of time is definitely starting to take a toll on me mentally, I need to learn how to create more separation between work and life so I can sleep better at night and hopefully have more days where I’m fired up to get to work!