Days 55-59: Less sleep, more stress

Emotions

This week was tough. I struggled a lot emotionally and lost a lot of sleep because I was thinking so much about work. I was pulled in many directions and that broke me a little bit this week. But not all of it was negative! I had some fun as well and had some really great meetings. Honestly, not having the face-to-face interactions with everyone in the office is definitely taking its toll on me, I need to learn how to deal with this emotionally moving forward.

Tasks

Overall, less meetings than the previous week but still a good variety. I spent some time balancing bugs for my team, looking at our feature for the upcoming milestone to understand next steps, and responding to email. Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed email starting to take up more and more time, it’s been surprising just how much more email I actually need to respond to now as a lead. Most days I find myself being added to seemingly random threads about things that are relevant to me and my team - my past managers usually wouldn’t add me to these types of threads unless it was absolutely necessary so I find myself having more respect for the deflecting that those managers did to save me time as an IC. Now it’s my responsibility to do the same!

I had some discussions to talk about shifting some of the resources on my team around and I’m really excited about the new work that we’re going to take on. It’s interesting being on the other side of the fence now, as an IC I remember sometimes being pulled from one project to another because there was a need for more resourcing but I was never part of the discussions behind that decision-making. I love being part of that now and seeing more of the behind-the-scenes, it feels very empowering.

Learnings

I really really really have to figure out how to not let work bleed so much into my personal life. I think it’s been happening more and more because I’ve been at home all the time but that reality isn’t going to change anytime soon. There are some strategies that I have in mind that will hopefully help alleviate some of this mental pain and I’m looking forward to trying this out in the upcoming week.

Something that I noticed this week was that I started losing track of some things, I need to make better use of my to do list. I really feel like I just need to spend a little extra time someday this upcoming week to solidify this before I start drowning in tasks. It’s been hard because the deliverables I’ve had are really varied and feel less concrete than “fix this bug” or “implement this feature”. Hopefully I’ll get a better system in place this week!