Overwhelmed with work
Overwhelmed with work
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/44032044
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10 comments
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Conventional wisdom: Do the smallest, easiest piece first.
For me, counter intuitive: Do the biggest/hardest thing first.
When people come to you with a small thing, tell them "I'd like to, but X has priority."
Typical response is "OMG, yes, do that first."
Once it's done and out of the way, everything else looks small.
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My problem is ignoring / declining the small things, especially if
- it's to help someone else, or
- it's more interesting than the big thing
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The big thing gives you permission to pass on the small things.
The smaller they are, the more likely someone else can help. If not? It's not world ending, they'll still be there.
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One thing at my last job that killed me was the security requirements for login. I would spend a week procrastinating and then be met with having to do multifactor verification to get access to the source code again. But it was this massive headache involving git credentials, the companies own "security" software, all wrapped inside of a virtual machine that needed additional steps, on top of the software just straight up not working randomly.
But I digress. The details aren't too important as long as it's understood it's a headache.
This shit literally just stopped me from working. It was so much hassle between other emails to reply to and distractions that I would literally spend a day getting logged back in correctly, end my day. And then just lose all motivation to work for awhile after.
I am not meant for this type of environment. It literally makes my brain turn to mashed potatoes.
So, to actually respond to your comment. Sometimes the "small things" are fucking massive for me. Like the hardest hurdles to get over. Because I get so frustrated or bored with them that I just lose all interest.
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Maybe I'm desperate for social interaction or maybe it's just a hyper-focus trigger. I'll spend hours of my time trying to help someone else when it's something I am good and confident at doing.
I literally wish there was a position at a company for someone that just went around listening to people's problems or complaints and then was able to offer solutions or optimizations.
This is probably autism kicking in a bit. But I need a new problem to solve each day and no job offers this. If I can't hyper-focus a solution in a day or two. I just lose interest and stop caring.
Oh this thing is due in two weeks? Sounds like something that I don't give a shit about.
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I'm 100% with you on the "traveling helper" idea. I love hearing about a pain point from someone during a meeting and thinking I have an idea for that... Like you said, I'll spend hours ignoring my actual work in order to help make this other person's job easier. In the past, I've referred to myself as a "force multiplier" by doing things to make other people's jobs easier, and I think this fits that quite well.
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It's not something appreciated until you're gone sadly.
My first job out of college was at Cisco. I worked on the software team but all our work was done on hardware in remote labs. So a lot of the job was just getting connected to that hardware in lab.
I wrote a bunch of scripts to automate reservation of hardware, remote power cycle, running tests. It was all initially to make my life easier. Would get asked to share them by other engineers.
Eventually after 4 years I had a complete library written that our entire team was using. I wonder if they're still being used today. I liked writing those scripts and helping other engineers more than my actual job.
If those scripts broke after I left I would assume the entire team probably lossed productivity significantly.
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Yep and when it's small it really doesn't seem like it needs doing.
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