Days 84-93: Most stressful time
Emotions
I took another week off from writing because I needed another break from thinking about work so this post will be covering two weeks of time. It’s been the most stressful time in my entire career so far - the amount of context-switching and tracking of items that I’ve been dealing with has been extraordinarily difficult. I’ve managed to still have some positive moments but for the most part, I’ve felt very pressurized, on-edge, and full of adrenaline. My coping mechanisms for dealing with this stress were tested beyond their limits during this time and my respect for the work my previous managers did went through the roof. The reality of this role is that it’s super difficult in the beginning (and yes, I still count 90+ days in as “the beginning”).
Even through difficult times, I’m someone who always tries to show outward positivity because my personal belief is that it strengthens the people around me. There were definitely some moments where I had a hard time doing this because I was under so much stress. It takes a lot to push me to that point so that’s a testament of the challenges I’ve been facing.
Tasks
My calendar has been relentless recently. It’s to the point where people ask me when to meet and I have to give them a date 1-2 weeks away because I just don’t have the time. This quantity of meetings has made it difficult for me to get other work done, I find myself doing other work during meetings in order to make adequate progress. Since my time has been so limited, there have been tasks that I needed to care a little less about and accept that they were going to fall behind. That’s a difficult reality for me, I’m someone who is used to being able to get my list of required stuff done in a relatively realistic timeframe. Now it’s at the point where that’s becoming difficult.
The context switching has also been insane recently. Here’s an idea of how I’ve been switching contexts:
Dial into a meeting, listening on the side to see if something important comes up that I need to respond to or know about
At the same time, coding/debugging a bug fix or feature
People asking me for help while I’m doing these two things, having to pause and help to keep others unblocked
Remembering that “one more thing” that needed to happen, take a note on that
Important email comes through, pause on everything to respond
Now, I realize that I can probably fix some of this workflow to some degree and push some of this out to another time. The problem is that I don’t have enough time to be able to fit this in later. I have been working extra hours to try and get those few more things done but I’m not scaling and don’t quite have the resources needed to get everything done. It’s a hard reality, I’m trying my best and trying to get advice from other people on how to deal with this situation but it’s really difficult.
Learnings
I’m reaching my limits morale-wise and motivation-wise, I’ll need to find ways to slow things down and get more organized to prevent myself from falling overboard. I’ll need to work on creating a giant list of stuff that needs to happen, prioritize it, delegate as much as I can, and then work through the rest in priority order. I still truly believe that the times when you are pushed the most are the opportunities to grow the most, I think it’s just been a long period of being pushed really hard. Mentally/emotionally, I am struggling. But that’s totally okay! I think anyone in my situation would struggle so I can’t beat myself up about that.
I want to continue to spread positivity around. A lot of people across my larger team are also in very high-stress situations, anything I can provide that will benefit the greater good is what I want to do. As I do this, I’ll need to be even more conscious about my own balance of emotions and keep myself mentally sane. It’s going to be tough but I will try and push through until the stress starts to go down.
