Feelings
Hello!
I hope you had a wonderful past week. Last Thursday, we celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary by going to dinner, and we had a wonderful time! We've also watched the Barbenheimer movies.
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Over the past week, I've had multiple topics on my mind. But underlying most of them was this moment of realization where I took a step back to gauge my feelings.
At first, I felt overwhelmed by the many proverbial balls I was trying to keep in the air. Over the past months, teams have reduced size with the current market. And has left most of us juggling multiple jobs or more tasks given fewer people for the same roles.
Overwhelmed
When feeling overwhelmed, I generally write down the tasks I need to accomplish and then either enumerate the order I want to tackle them or rely on something like the Eisenhower Matrix.
I've also bought something called the anti-planner, which, as the name suggests, is not a planner but rather a guide with tips depending on how you're feeling about the tasks you need to take on.
Sometimes, I can't start a task, and only some things have to do with being overwhelmed.
Lost
Sometimes, I need clarification as to what a task entails. The definition needs to be narrower, or the planning horizon needs to be shorter. In either of the cases, I might be putting the task away because, in some cases, that means sitting down and breaking it down further.
Breaking it down will also make me feel like I don't know what I'm doing. Who am I to tell people what to do?
Frustration
Other times, I feel frustrated with a task. Maybe I've broke it down and have an idea of where to go and the intermediate milestones. But there's the need for meetings, not only for buy-in, and external teams request formal help via some tracking system.
If you work in a large company, functions are very narrow, so you need to enlist multiple teams to create a functionality. For example, if you wanted to rank a list of resources via some historical database information, you should enlist the help of a database team, a data lake team, an AI/ML team, etc.
Preparing, talking, and setting up things like formal "help request" on some tracking system, see that it gets prioritized, that it aligns with your plans, that requires mental fortitude, and some days being overwhelmed I can't deal with that, so it ends up being delayed.
Everything is valid
You might be feeling similar feelings or others! All emotions are valid, and we bring all of these with us when we come to work with multiple people, teams with different backgrounds and cultures of their own.
I've come to appreciate these feelings in myself, recognize them in others, and better interact with other teams, not because we should walk on eggshells but because we're all human beings with feelings and sentiments.
Your turn
How do you deal with feelings at work? Have you had to recognize emotions in others? Are you attuned to that? or do you let feelings overwhelm you occasionally? Let me know by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Oscar
Things I discovered in the past week
- Anything But Tech Debt is an interesting article from Emily Nakashima about changing the mental model around "tech debt" and splitting it into multiple types of labels. This allows for communication when trying to get buy-in to fix it.
- In good hands is an interesting post on how the author can open their mind to new ideas when they feel they're in good hands.
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website | twitter | github | linkedin | mastodon | among others