Days 70-74: Some relief

Emotions

Overall a pretty happy week leading into what was a 4-day weekend for me. I’ve also had a lot of pent up stress about a lot of my responsibilities and after having discussions with a bunch of different people this week, I felt more relieved and confident. The stress was still there (and will always be there) but I’m slowly having an easier time coping with it.

Tasks

At this point, every week I have is full of meetings (with this week being no exception). In this 4-day week, I had 24 hours of meetings. This just includes what was on my calendar but I had calls outside of those times with individuals across my team. Out of these meetings, I had the most fun attending the design discussion meetings for a feature that a couple people on my team are working on. It was enjoyable to bounce ideas off each other and work together on creating the best design with the right scope. This type of technical problem solving is what I’ve been enjoying recently as opposed to the technical coding I was doing previously.

As we are approaching summer time, interns are beginning to join. I had the opportunity to connect with two interns who report to other managers in my org. Being a former intern myself, I enjoy connecting with interns ever summer to build connections with them and try and make their experience great. It’s awesome to see the curiosity and drive in the interns year after year so I’m happy that I started chatting with some of them already.

The times when I wasn’t in meetings this week was mostly spent trying to clarify requirements on projects and helping individuals on my team. I’m still staying involved from a technical perspective on the work that most of my team is doing so I’ve been able to continue working with them in that aspect as well.

Learnings

I’ve always had this feeling that I put too much stress on myself at times and this week was an affirmation of that. That looming feeling of having to get everything done or having to know everything has been difficult to cope with. Talking to my manager and other leaders on the team this week made me realize that I don’t need to put as much pressure on myself. I definitely still want to set my bar high and try to meet or exceed my own expectations but I’m figuring out how different my expectations vs the expectations others have for me are.