Tag: Stress Management (page 1 of 1)

Despite already writing a similar post about this topic myself, I have still been struggling recently to keep my work at work, struggling with not thinking about it in my free time in the evenings and on weekends. Looking for some professional guidance from an outside perspective online, I found this great article from Harvard Business Review that I want to share with others.

Using Technology to Log Out for the Day

Steps 1 and 3 from the article come easily to me. While I don’t have specific hours I am required to be at work, I am great at keeping a regular work schedule for myself that I don’t normally deviate from. Once I log out at 5 PM each day, I don’t check Teams messages, and I don’t even have my work email on my phone so I can’t check that even if I wanted to. I manage this system using the Focus Time feature on my iPhone.

I have two different scheduled Focus Time settings for my phone: 1) Work and 2) Personal Time. I’ve set up the Work Focus Time to be active during my normal work hours and it only allows notifications from Teams, my two-factor authentication apps, and a couple of important family members. Then I’ve set up the Personal Time custom Focus Time to be the opposite: it runs from the time I get off work to the time I start work in the morning and blocks any notifications from Teams or other work-related applications.

This system has been working really well for me and I would recommend others try it out if they haven’t already, because then you never need to think about which notifications to turn off after work each day, or worse, just keep getting those notifications all evening and weekend long that take your mind back to work when it shouldn’t be there.

Struggling with “Mental Clarity” Around Work

Steps 2 and 4 from the HBR article are more challenging for me lately than I would like them to be. Step 2 is to get “mental clarity”, which essentially means that you should know each day what tasks you need to accomplish at work, by keeping a running to-do list or somewhere else to manage all your thoughts about work. I used to be great at this before the last couple months, when my job became less clear and began changing. I stopped keeping a physical notebook because I needed a new system to keep related notes related and physically close since I now have larger projects to manage rather than small tickets to work on daily or weekly. Once I stopped heavily utilizing my physical notebook, I stopped creating daily to-do lists for myself to accomplish.

Not having a go-to place to list out all the current and future things I will need to complete has led to the problem of me randomly remembering important things I need to do for work at inconvenient times, like when I’m trying to fall asleep. I’m sure many can relate to that. This mental clarity step reminds me of the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen that I read a couple years ago. One of the main points of that book is you need to be constantly dumping thoughts out of your head onto paper (or anywhere you want as long as it’s consistent) so your brain can trust it doesn’t need to constantly remind you of important things at inappropriate times. If you know that you always write important tasks in the same location, you know that anything important is in that location and not just in your head. The Harvard Business Review article made me realize I need to get back to that organization method and start actually using the digital note page I made awhile ago that is supposed to act as my catch-all list of items on my plate now and in the future.

One final note on the mental clarity step of keeping work at work– I actually do still manage to complete an end-of-day wrap up each work day where I write out everything I accomplished throughout the day along with notes for what I need to do the next day and a review of the next day’s calendar. I occasionally skip days of this, so I would like to schedule time for this each day going forward so I’m more diligent about doing it.

The Need to Feel Accomplished

The final step to keeping work at work recommended in the article that I’ve been struggling with the most recently is step 4, which says that you need to get work done at work. It may seem crazy for someone to not get work done during their work day if they’re showing up on time and leaving usually later than they should, but it is entirely possible if you allow your entire schedule to be consumed by meetings with no or minimal time between them. My job has morphed into a collaboration-focused position where I suddenly need to have meetings upon meetings about everything related to the projects I am working on. This means that on an average day, I have multiple hours of meetings with colleagues, and somehow they all seem to leave 30-minute gaps between to tease me with the possibility of getting work done, but then I never actually get time to focus in those gaps.

This cycle of continual meetings and no long stretches of work time has made it really difficult for me to have any decent amount of time to focus on the deliverables I need to complete. While sure, you could theoretically get good work done in the 30 minutes between meetings, reality is much different when you need to work on a confusing or difficult task. Those types of work items are better suited for longer stretches of dedicated focus time, at least one hour but hopefully two or more. That is a rare occurrence in my current work life and I want to change that, and will do so by following the recommendations of this HBR article, and actually some of my own advice from a previous blog post. I need to schedule blocks of one or more hours each day to focus on work. My plan is to do that on Friday afternoons the week before or Monday mornings the week of, so I can block out work time for an entire week to get ahead of meetings that will inevitably be scheduled.

Summary

While the advice of the Harvard Business Review article isn’t entirely new to me, it did act as a great trigger to remind me of the valuable work skills I have neglected recently so I can revive them. Going forward, I am going to revitalize my use of my own calendar and digit notebook to see if that helps me feel more in control and less caught up in the whirlwind at work.

Give the HBR article a read and see if any of it speaks to you like it spoke to me. Is there something in your work-life balance situation that could be improved to reduce your overall stress?

Welcome back to part two of my discussion on ways to help manage stress and chaos at work. These posts are specifically aimed at database and application developers and IT personnel as a whole, although I think most of the topics would also apply to other office workers. Today’s post will cover the final three topics in the list below. If you would like to catch up on last week’s part one post, you can find it here.

Once again, I hope you find something valuable in this post, and I would love to hear your thoughts about how you’ve implemented these and had them work (or not!) in your own life. Thanks for reading!

1. Your calendar is your best friend, use it to your advantage
2. Only work on one thing at a time
3. Every work request should be a ticket (mostly)
4. Set times to catch up on email and messages throughout the day
5. Do the hardest and most important work first thing in the morning
6. Track what you spend your time on

Set times for yourself to catch up on emails and messages throughout the day

Going back to the advice to only work on one thing at a time, that should also include emails and messages. If you’ve never heard of the concept of context switching, I think you should read into it because it can be a huge time-sink if you don’t control it as much as possible. (Read about context switching from Atlassian here.)

While I am working, I find that if I am constantly being bombarded with messages and emails from other people, I get incrementally more stressed as the day goes on because it all starts to be overwhelming, especially when the group chats are going at 100 miles per hour some days. Plus, the context switching of always losing focus to read what new chats are coming in as they come in is tiring and prevents me from getting important things done. This is why I’ve set a rule for myself that I will use Focus Time like I said in part one, and will give myself dedicated time throughout the day to focus on working, but will also mentally set times throughout the day to stay connected with coworkers.

I try to work with a loose version of the Pomodoro Method of intensely focusing on a task for 25-50 minutes and then taking a 5-10 minute break from that task. I used an actual timer app in the past, but now I don’t use it and mentally keep track of how long I’ve been focused on one thing. Then when the break time comes, I will quickly catch up on and respond to any messages I’ve received while focusing. Emails I only check about 3 times a day, after my morning standup, before going to lunch, and before leaving for the day, since usually email is not as urgent as Teams messages. This method gives you the best of both worlds of still being able to help your teammates with their work while still being able to get your work done without too much context switching.

Do the hardest and most important work first thing in the morning

This concept is what many in the self-help world refer to as “eat the frog”, which I think is a pretty weird name, but the concept is a good one. I am a natural procrastinator. You would have thought I would have learned my lesson with many late nights in college trying to finish work the night or two before a deadline, but I guess not. My procrastination comes from a fear that I won’t know what to do when I get into the task I need to complete, and then it will be scary because I won’t know how to proceed. However, not once in my professional career so far have I ever been assigned a task that I knew 0% about what needed to be done, even if all I know about the task is that someone wrote a vague document about it 5 years ago or that it needs to use recursion to get the data.

With all of this in mind, in about the last 6 months or so, I’ve focused on starting my day out by working on the most challenging and important tasks first thing in the morning. I usually start work around 7 AM and have my first meeting each day a 9:15 AM, so I know I usually have about 2 hours to buckle down and focus on that one difficult task, so I have no excuse to not focus on the task. I still don’t like doing the challenging thing, but doing it first thing in the morning makes sure I have the mental energy to do it because I’m freshly awake and am sipping on my morning coffee. Starting early also means that when I inevitably make good progress on it before lunch, I can have a sense of accomplishment and a lighter load after lunch (when the onslaught of meetings normally begins). For the scenarios where I don’t make significant progress in the morning because the task is that challenging, at least I know I put my best effort of the day into it to make some amount of progress instead of procrastinating on it and becoming even more afraid of the task at hand.

Track what you spend your time on

This relates to my earlier advice about making every work request a ticket, but this advice to track what you spend your time on isn’t exclusive to ticket work. I also recommend that you track the time spent on other activities as well so you know what truly is taking a lot of time in your work day. If you are constantly helping others (which can be good) instead of doing your work, you may look back on the day or week and wonder where your time went and why you weren’t able to finish your tasks. I have been in that exact position, which is why I started keeping track of all the work I complete throughout the day, including small calls with teammates to help them with their work, meetings, and even presentation work time. I do this, including keeping a general summary of what I did or learned with each of my tickets, with a daily OneNote page, but you can track it in any way you would like.

In the past, I tried using Trello and other software to do this timekeeping for me, but it always ended up being too complicated so I would inevitably stop using the software and stop tracking what I was working on. This year, I decided to make a OneNote page for each day of work and made a default template to use for all new pages that would give me the list of things I want to track each day. Then at the end of the week, I compile and summarize the daily work into a page that I call “Weekly Summary”, and add any notable work into my list of accomplishments for the year. This method speeds up and eases the process of identifying accomplishments so that when the annual review time comes around, I will have plenty of items to pull from my list instead of trying to remember it all myself (which I don’t because I have a terrible memory for these things).

My daily summary page contains the following items:

• Tickets worked on (I will write about the challenges I’ve faced with the ticket today as well as the progress made on it)
• Tickets closed
• Resources found/used (this is where I keep track of the random StackOverflow pages or blogs I’ve used to help myself with my work throughout the day)
• Other work completed (this is where I list any calls, meetings, etc.)
• Other notes

Once I made the OneNote page template with these items, it became much easier for me to stick with completing the daily summary since I never had to think or retype the main bullet points. This process has helped me define how much time I spend on various activities throughout the day and week which gives me perspective on how much I do (a lot).

Your work time is important, guard it ferociously

My goal for these posts was to give others ideas for how to tame their workload to make it feel more manageable and less overwhelming. I hope that some of these ideas spark something for you to implement in your work life. Overall, I would like to get the point across that your work time is important, and your mental health relating to work is important, so guard both of these things ferociously. Managing your time and not letting others make your life hectic can help prevent burnout, or at least slow it down. These strategies have helped immensely in my chaotic work life, so I hope they can also help with yours.

Recently, I was suddenly given responsibility for all database development work for the application I support, plus many other work items not directly related to the application, when previously I had been splitting that work with another developer. I wasn’t expecting this change, and neither was anyone else, so I was immediately overwhelmed with the amount of work, questions, and requests for review that were coming my way. The first week of this new responsibility was chaos, and it made me realize I needed to tighten up my work organization strategies. I’ve always been someone who keeps my work organized and tried to keep myself to a set pattern of efficient behavior, but it wasn’t as regulated as I needed to keep on top of the flood of work that suddenly came my way. I quickly developed a set of organization and work strategies to make sure I stay on top of everything I’m responsible for while also not being extremely stressed by the workload. Plus, I love helping other people and didn’t want to stop helping other developers because of the new workload, so I made sure my new strategy allowed time to continue with that.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and disorganized with your work and would like some ideas for getting organized to reduce those problems, keep reading. I ended up having a lot more to say on this topic than I originally thought, so I’ve split this topic into two posts. This post will cover the first three ideas on the list below, and the final three will be covered in next week’s post.

1. Your calendar is your best friend, use it to your advantage
2. Only work on one thing at a time
3. Every work request should be a ticket
4. Set times for yourself to catch up on email and messages throughout the day
5. Do the hardest and most important work first thing in the morning
6. Track what you spend your time on

That may seem like a lot of items to add to your already stressful work life but trust me, getting and keeping things organized takes a huge load of stress off of your shoulders. You can’t control what craziness gets thrown at you by others, but you can control how you react to the craziness and how you structure your day to handle that craziness. Plus, if you pick just one or two to start with, ones that would benefit you the most with the least amount of effort, it won’t feel like a burden to use these strategies.

Your calendar is your best friend, use it to your advantage

Seriously, if you’re not using your work calendar already to manage meetings and schedule yourself time to work on what you need to get done, you should start doing it immediately. Whether your calendar is shared with others or not, blocking times for yourself to work on specific tasks can allow you to prepare for that work time mentally and then fully concentrate on that work when the time comes. Plus, it keeps you accountable for getting work done. Here are my 3 quick tips on how you can utilize your calendar to its fullest:

1. If you use Outlook and your organization has the feature enabled, use the Microsoft Viva plugin to schedule Focus Time for yourself every day. Focus Time is a feature that will automatically schedule blocks of time on your calendar, two weeks at a time, for you to focus on what you need to. While in Focus Time, your status on Teams will be changed to Do Not Disturb so that you won’t get all the pesky notifications of chats, posts, updates, etc. to reduce distractions. I have loved this feature since it got added because it gives me a dedicated and justifiable time for not responding to the constant chats I get throughout the day. Most people in my organization understand that Focus time is sacred and that I won’t be responding to their chats until after the allotted time has ended.
2. Schedule work time for the most important items you need to complete. Put it on your calendar and have it set your status as Busy for that time. The most important effect of doing this is it will let others know not to schedule meetings over this time (unless they don’t respect calendars in general, which is a separate problem). I usually schedule myself non-Focus Time work times when there is an important meeting coming up and I need to prepare for it. I will set aside 30 minutes to an hour before the meeting when I know I will work on that one task. And when the time arrives for you to work on whatever it was that was scheduled, don’t respond to emails or chats. Setting this time aside for yourself will help keep you on top of what needs to get done when it needs to get done so you’re never unprepared for a meeting or other task again.
3. On the same note as #2 above, at the beginning of each week, block out time on your calendar every day for lunch and breaks, if you take them. I have found that I am the most productive and feel the best personally when I take a midmorning break, an hour lunch break (to go the gym), and a midafternoon break. I have started blocking out those times on my calendar which prevents people from scheduling over my breaks and also gives me reminders when it is time to take a break. If I didn’t have the reminder pop up, half the time I would forget I need to take one and would then feel burned out at the end of the day.

Only work on one thing at a time

This piece of advice is easier said than done, especially if you work in an organization that often suffers from poor planning or conflicting priorities, but I would like to say it is possible for everyone. It’s at least physically the only way to work (unless you’ve developed a way to code on two different programs at once). Since you can only physically work on one project at a time, and have your focus directed to a single thing at once, that is the best starting point to fight for yourself to get buy-off from management or project managers for only working on one thing at a time.

For me, when things got crazy at work, I realized that I could no longer handle the stress of trying to accomplish all of the business goals within the same time frame they were originally scheduled for. I have worked extremely stressful jobs in the past and had vowed I would never put up with that again, so I had to set boundaries for myself in my current work to reduce the stress. I began pushing back on the analysts and program managers who decided on work priority to give them the burden of making the difficult prioritization decisions that I felt I was facing, given there was now only one DB dev doing the project work.

As an example, during the craziest week of my life at my current job, I was already assigned two tickets, one of them high-priority. Then I went on vacation and came back and was assigned another high-priority ticket that had a deadline in less than two weeks and it was something I had never done before. As soon as I saw that mess, I went to our SA and asked him which of those 3 “high priority” tickets was the most important, stating that I could only work on one task at a time and there were only so many hours in the day, so they needed to tell me the order in which I should work them, according to the business needs. Within a few hours, I had an ordered list provided to me as to what I should be focusing on that day.

But after you push back and get a truly prioritized list of work items, you then need to keep your boundaries in place, no matter what else tries to happen. If others are coming up to you and asking you for a lot of help with whatever they’re working on, tell them that you are currently unable to help but would love to help later after you’ve finished your current task (within reason, if you work in a collaborative environment like I do, you can’t blow your coworkers off all the time). Or if someone else is trying to assign you more tickets that need to be done “right now”, push back on them and your manager and make everyone else work together to figure out how the new task fits in your current list, and switch if needed.

Every work request should be a ticket

This piece of advice is one I’ve used on myself for both of my development jobs so far in my career, and I think it’s one of the easiest to enforce. If you are being asked to do work that will take 30 minutes or more, no matter what it is, create a ticket for it or have the requester make the ticket. I do this to cover myself because I never want to be the person who’s eternally busy but with no metrics to show where their time goes. Even if others don’t admit it, they may be wondering what you’re doing all day if you have no hours logged on tickets. If you set a standard that everything gets a ticket, you won’t ever have to worry about that. Also, having everything as a ticket can help with the prioritization of all work on your plate and helps keep all your current and future work documented and organized. Plus, I like to keep everything in tickets for the satisfaction at the end of the year of seeing how many work items I completed, along with the number of hours total I spent on everything I did (I love data, even on myself).

Conclusion

The three ideas above are only half of the story of what I have been using recently to keep my chaotic work life more organized. I won’t promise that it will make everything sunshine and rainbows, but it at least keeps the chaos reigned in a bit and brings it down to a manageable level. If you’re interested in reading more about the final three methods I’m using for organization, that post will be going up next week. I hope these suggestions are as helpful to you as they have been for me!