Days 6-9: Shorter week = higher stress

Emotions

This was the week of President’s Day so I had Monday off but that led to an increased amount of stress throughout the week as I tried to crunch through as much work as possible. I was also super excited to come to work this week and looked forward to the next set of challenges that I would face that were going to help me learn and grow.

Tasks

I had a wide-range of tasks as I continued working through balancing my individual contributor (IC) work mixed in with my managerial work. Here’s a short list to give you an idea:

• Met with cross-organization partner team to discuss future stuff

• Closed on design for a new feature, created architecture diagrams, and went through architecture review

• Worked with a different cross-organization partner team to validate that the work they did is compatible with our product

• Had my first 1:1 with my new manager

• Participated in the first of a series of “friendly competition”/team building events

Similar to the previous week, my calendar was absolutely booked for this short 4-day week but I managed to squeeze time here and there to get through some of my IC work.

Learnings

There’s going to be a period of time as I fully transition into this new role where there’s simply going to be a higher workload than what I’ve had recently. This was a good realization to have this week and I was able to live through a couple of work philosophies that I believe in:

“Longer days are only a problem if they become a norm”

“It’s totally fine to put in that extra time if you love what you’re doing”

For the next little bit, I’m going to have those days where I’m working a little more but I love what I’ve been doing so far.