Accidentally in Code

Tag: overwhelmed

  • Doing Too Much

    Doing Too Much

    This is Today (20/366)
    Credit: flickr / 427

    The other day, one of my friends tweeted about taking on too much and feeling overwhelmed. A mutual friend tweeted that he should speak to me.

    I guess I’m becoming known for that taking on too much, getting overwhelmed, crashing thing I repeat ad nauseum. Hmm. I have noticed a pattern where friends start noticing that I’m taking on too much and I’m like, “naah, this is how I live!” or “yeah this week is hectic but things are fine”. And shortly after I get sick and I think, “hmm, X was right”. Vow to be more effective in future, to say no, to prioritize better.

    Maybe I’m doing those things. I’m definitely trying. But each successful strategy just makes me take on more stuff, so that I’m always at capacity, and pretty often feeling overwhelmed. For example, I delegated, prioritized and then as I was feeling more chilled out about things, after the 3rd or 4th email I thought it would be a good idea to climb the CN tower. Two months away seemed ages and I figured it would be a good challenge. Of course it falls in a “hectic” week where I’m also travelling to Ottawa and a few days post-climb I’m throwing an InsufficientCateTimeException. Guzzling painkillers and being my own heater as I don’t have time to be sick right now. I say it’s just a bad week for it – but let’s face it, every week is bad. I could schedule something with a month’s notice, maybe.

    Doing less is not an appealing option, though. The reality is, I love my life and I love having lots going on. I’d just like there to be more hours in the day. Then I could fit everything in, and have time to watch Desperate Housewives. For me, it’s about maintaining that balance between hectic but motivated by how much is going on – and overwhelmed. I hit overwhelmed at about 20% above impossible. Anything below 80% of impossible for too long and life becomes boring.

    I think the answer is an evening a week of what I call Cate Time. Cate time involves working out alone, novels, movies, tv shows, copious amounts of tea and edamame, and not speaking to anyone (I’m always amused when people think I’m really extroverted, I’m so ambivert – it’s just almost no-one sees me when I’m on an introverted phase). I need it to function socially, and to be creative. In my feedback for this quarter one of my colleagues suggested that I start blocking off “make time” in my calendar. I used to do that. It didn’t work for me, as what I need to see in my calendar is blank space – whitespace. I need it to function, and so I make sure it’s there during working hours, or I change my working hours to find it. I just haven’t been doing that in the evenings lately.

    Perhaps fortunately, a snow storm scuppered my plan for Sunday and I got a personal snow day. There was no edamame, and no gym (sore throat). But there was a lot of tea, several books, and a good amount of whitespace. Things seem surmountable, again.

    Ideas

    • Stop borrowing from my Cate Time. It’s important. If I’m busy four nights during the week, I’m busy all week.
    • Crazy idea –  allocate a week a month where I don’t agree to do anything that is not being a software engineer. I.e. no lunches, no events. I’ll add an event that says “DNS – Cate is anti-social this week”.

  • Insufficient Whitespace

    Some time ago, Derek wrote this amazing post titled Needs More Whitespace. I was thinking about it lately because it seems like things are so hectic, and no sooner does one thing end than another begins – I got back from California, was on a panel, my boyfriend moved to Canada, then my friend moved here from Edinburgh 3 days later and is staying with us, I went to Toronto and gave a talk, I switched teams, we announced AF KW. Next week I’m going to Ottawa, and climbing the CN tower, and there’s a paper deadline – I meant to reformat and add some stuff to my last paper and resubmit. Who knows how that will go. My new team is headed to California next week and wants me to go. I managed to say no – aside from everything I already have on next week and the stubborn inability of my body to be in multiple places at once, I have the ultimate excuse right now, visa issues. It looks like things will be fine now but I’m likely going to be unable to leave the country for a little while. That has been stressful, too.

    I am so tired that my fantasies feature hanging out in my pajamas and not speaking to anyone. It feels like, if things could just stop, for a moment, and I could catch my breath, things would be OK.

    Not.        Enough.        Whitespace.

    I keep writing, again and again, the same post, that this is no way to live. So strung out. Completely overcommitted. And then I get my breathing space, appreciate it briefly, and take off again. Until next time.

    It seems so easy, when things are calm. Have a routine! Stick to it! Prioritize things that keep you sane! Delegate! Say no!

    And yet, here I am again, feeling like I’m being crushed. Unable to decide whether I want most to cry, or to sleep.

    So – no grand plans or resolutions. Just an acknowledgement. Have taken on too much. Again. Feel completely strung out. Again. Exhausted. Again. Questioning whether it’s all worth it. Again.

    I’m reminding myself that thus far, it’s invariably been worth it. And so I’m heading to the gym to train for that tower climb – it’s more productive than crying myself to sleep, afterall.

  • One Positive Thing

    One Positive Thing

     

    Palace of Arts, Staircase
    Credit: Flickr / Istvan

    I have a simple rule when I get overwhelmed.

    One. Positive. Thing.

    It’s so simple that whatever state I’m in I can’t argue with it. It’s so easy that there can never be an excuse. But, applied diligently, it can change pretty much everything.

    When I’m in a tizzy, one of the first things to go is the state of my apartment. If I say one positive thing, and keep at that for a week, it becomes livable again. Some days all I do is load the dishwasher. But others it snowballs. I start with “take out the trash” and end up with a sparkling bathroom. I just need to start.

    When my self-esteem is on the floor because I’m unhappy with how I look, I use it. It’s a lot easier to get out of bed and go to the gym for 6am when I know that this is all I’m going to ask of myself in that regard all day (of course, having started off so well I’ll tend to eat better and sleep earlier, too). If it’s not a gym day, my one positive thing can be “no chocolate”.

    Often one positive thing is about attitude. It’s focusing on the design that I came up with, rather than the change that I didn’t get approved (again). It’s thinking, “I made time to go to the chiro which will make my shoulder better and then I can work out harder” rather than focusing on the fact that I rolled over and didn’t go spinning that morning. It’s thinking about the thing I did for my boyfriend, rather than the fact that we are (still) on different continents.

    The power of sustained small achievements is underrated. If every day I did one positive thing for my health, my living space, and my relationship, what would my world look like a month, six months, a year from now?

    I decided that February I would focus on rehab. What this has meant for me, is that almost every day in February I did one positive thing for getting my shoulder better – sometimes chiro, sometimes massage, sometimes the gym, and sometimes (frankly) strong painkillers. It’s in a lot better shape now, and I’m in a lot less pain than back in January.

    Meanwhile, one of my friends is completely overwhelmed by… life, I guess, but particularly school work. So I shared this rule with her. She’s been getting overwhelmed by everything, but one thing? That seems totally doable.

    So it seemed worth sharing with you as well. Try it, and let me know how it goes. Meanwhile, what tricks do you have for making things seem manageable when you’re overwhelmed?

  • Fighting Incrementalist Tendencies

    Fighting Incrementalist Tendencies

    The Ladder
    Credit: flickr / rodricar

    I originally posted Making Ideas Happen: The Dreamer, the Doer, and the Incrementalist as a not-so-subtle hint to one of the dreamers in my life, and a reminder to myself to be aware of the downsides of being an incrementalist. And then Meggin left this great comment (emphasis added):

    I’m an incrementalist, through and through. Urgghhh. I was on a leadership course awhile back and we had our work personality types tested and I came out in extremes an innovator and a finisher (exactly equal). And I totally agree with the above – one would think that being an incrementalist is the ideal position, but it isn’t, it’s just another position. I constantly have this feeling that my creative ideas are not getting the time they deserve to see them through and the projects I need to finish are not getting the creative energy they deserve.

    The real kicker of being an incrementalist is that people expect you to be both creative and to finish things, and that at any point the unexpected happens, so you don’t have the time you thought you did (which is very common in all our lives), you are inevitably letting someone down in not meeting creative or deadline expectations (as you have to usually sacrifice one for the other in times of crunch). I’m in release mode – so that might explain why I am venting. Thanks for post.

    I headed back to Europe to see the doctor, get a new passport, and focus. I need to be in hardcore doer mode in order to finish my thesis. I thought part of the problem was that I was bored of it and fighting to go back to being in a dreamer phase. And then I finished the IBM publication (no more patents to read – yay!) and the education paper my TA and I were working on, made some good progress on my thesis, and did the bulk (I hope) of the editing for my accepted paper.

    And then I faced this new problem. Other projects. CompSci Woman is not being updated lately because neither Maggie nor I have capacity to hustle for submissions. I’m letting myself off feeling guilty about that – there’s a limit to what I can do (but if you’ve been thinking about contributing, but haven’t – please do). Then there’s some half-an-hour task that is just weighing on me because it involves writing up something and I just have this feeling of can’t. Can’t be creative with that. Can’t rearrange that into a coherent story. Can’t take that on as my problem and I really, really wish someone else would just step up and do it.

    But why would they? Normally I’m fine being an incrementalist. Normally I’d say, “it’s just half an hour, just do it and it’s gone”. Normally it falls under that class of delegation where it’s less work to just do it myself. My inner control freak just loves that – getting comfortable delegating has been tough for me and so I give it these small pleasures. Honestly, being an incrementalist comes so naturally to me that I don’t think people notice what I do, how much I’m taking care of. Just get on with it. Just check it off. Oh, no it wasn’t a big deal. Because usually – it isn’t.

    This whole doer thing means one project. One. That project is my thesis. Everything else is for someone else to take care of, or on ice.

    So – deep breath – I handed off that nagging task. And the person I spoke to was totally understanding. What was I worrying about?

  • Shipping

    Shipping

    a great girl
    Credit: flickr / cambiodefractal

    To mark my 4 week anniversary in Kitchener, I didn’t have a party (as suggested by AY), I instead had a week long crisis. I think AY had the better idea…

    It was a number of things. Moving. Change. The stress and difficulty of dealing with the appalling Goodlife (there’s some deep irony in that name). The clocks changed and I started waking up when it’s still dark, and having nowhere to go. Freaking out over my thesis. Two years in grad school, remarkably unworried about it (I’m told) and panic finally set in. I spent far too much time contemplating the webpage of a guy in graduate admissions at Carleton who suggested a couple of times – joking I’m sure – that I transfer. I was very close to emailing him and asking how joking was he.

    I’m not panicking about writing my thesis. I’m panicking about what I do with it when I’ve written it. I have no idea – and frankly, I’m terrified of finding out.

    The biggest thing, though, was some jackass being patronizing and disparaging of something I was concerned about. I’m told – by other engineers, who understand why I’m worried – that my concern is valid. It’s now being addressed through other means. However. This one person, ignoring my question, finally calling to “answer” it – only to try and make me feel stupid for asking it… threw me off completely. He didn’t make me feel stupid for asking it. He did make me furious, and start questioning some big decisions I’ve made lately. It resulted in me not exploring another option – not because I’m so happy of where I am and what I’m doing, but because I feel like it’s too late and if I’ve made a horrible mistake… I don’t need any more information about that to make me feel bad.

    So I spent a lot of time in tears. And I kept getting up, feeling like I wasn’t ready to face the day yet, and napping on the couch until it was light. In the midst of this, my trainer annihilated my thighs to the point where I could barely walk for two days, so no gym.

    Just me, completely overwhelmed by everything, wracked with indecision.

    no one can hear you!
    Credit: flickr / g-mikee

    I’m reading Making Ideas Happen at the moment. And something in there struck me. Shipping. And I realized, that typically I ship things every day – blog posts, draft work, emails… and I’d stopped. Nothing had left me.

    I booked into the spa for a mudwrap. But first, I read this huge paper (a warm up to being productive) and sent the email I’d been agonizing over. Then afterwards, I made myself ship some academic work in the form of a blogpost.

    I still feel overwhelmed. I still napped again this morning. But then I finished a blogpost I’d been struggling to write. Now this one is flowing more. I have a plan for what I will work on later – and I’ll aim to ship a draft of a document I need to write.

    And – I said no to my escape route, because I don’t want to run away. And the situation with the jackass will work itself out – someone else is taking it seriously, and now some circumstances have changed making it a different problem of known size.

    Finally, I’m overwhelmed by grad school and the dreaded thesis. But, I think if I just keep shipping stuff towards that goal, day in, day out, it’ll be OK.

  • Not (Quite) Having a Meltdown

    Stress
    Credit: flickr / BrittneyBush

    I’ve had a rough couple of weeks. I was told my work didn’t make a contribution, went through a rocky patch with my boyfriend, had loads of events for WISE, including one huge, never been done before one, had the whole job search and resume writing process, wrote a paper in just over a week, hurt my lower back trying to teach a small child to ski and aggravated my knee injury training.

    Over the course of this, I’ve been trying to come up with something new and interesting to write on this blog 5 days a week. I often think of these ideas on the walk to school, and honestly, there have been days when I felt so strung out that what I wanted to write about was how I felt like I was having some kind of nervous breakdown, and how do you tell?

    I haven’t. In part because I like to be positive here, but also because I had a job interview on Wednesday and I didn’t want that post going out the day I was Googled (yes, they checked out my website). But then I was looking at the posts that I’ve had featured on Brazen Careerist: there’s The Importance of Perspectives (where I admit that I’ve not been loving what I do lately), Dream Big or Go Home (where I admit to being afraid to fail) and Rediscovering Balance (where I write about last semester being miserable and needing to take a break from my life). Of course, I try and give these a positive spin, and focus on the things I’m learning from the experience. But is that the posts people find most useful/interesting? Not my tech-focused posts like this one on humans and developers, or this one on Facebook?

    The truth is, that I take on a lot and want to bring 110% to everything I do, but ultimately sometimes I can’t bring 110% or I screw up and this devastates me. I set myself aggressive goals, challenge myself constantly and as a result I fail everyday. I feel like a failure a lot of the time, but I try to believe that I am only a failure if I stop trying.

    So why have the last few weeks been so difficult? I’ve finally had some space to think and I think it’s not the volume, it’s the intensity; i.e. it’s not how much I’m trying to do, it’s how important the things happening right now are. Maybe this is normal as graduation approaches? The university stuff is stressful because this is something I’ve been working on for months, and it directly impacts when I will graduate. The job hunting stuff, well we all know that’s stressful, right? I think it’s the waiting. I interviewed on Wednesday and at the end of the day Thursday I haven’t heard. On Wednesday I was positive, but as I write this (on Thursday afternoon) all I can think of is better examples to answer every question and a concept for the problem we were talking about that I think is really workable (I had the genesis of this idea in the interview, but not enough to think it worth mentioning. Now it’s fully formed). I was convinced after the interview that I would be a perfect fit for this project – and I still 100% believe that – but, I’m also 75%+ convinced I’m going to be rejected and debating my backup plan – should I ski in New Zealand, do yoga in Ibiza? Apply to a work experience/language program in France? Or, stop running away and keep putting myself out there for potential rejection.

    There’s an obvious analogy between dating and job hunting, but here’s the kicker: if some guy rejects you it’s easy to rationalize, weird uber-Catholic interfering parents, for example, or (the classic) commitment issues. But when a successful and innovative company rejects you, it has to be you, right? Either you wouldn’t be great at it, or you didn’t present yourself in such a way that you managed to convince someone else you would be great at it.

    Now, time for my positive spin. How have I been hiding my meltdown? Literally physically hiding is one way, I guess. Aside from my non-response to email, who can tell? I have been (trying to) maintain a positive attitude in conversation, where instead of moaning about “oh I’m so overwhelmed” I talk about what I’m doing instead. I’ve tried to minimize my commitments, but keep the ones I have made already (I hate being flaky, the guilt of letting someone down typically is more time consuming than actually doing the thing I’ve committed to). Last week, I gave myself a break from working out. I’ve grabbed relaxation time whilst I could, e.g. watching movies whilst marking and running experiments – I find I focus better on boring and somewhat mindless tasks if I’ve allocated a distraction, and as a result I’m less likely to be sidetracked by other distractions.

    And going forward, what can I change? Really, I want to try not to cram so many stressful/highly important things together in a short space. I think for the past 3 weeks, it’s been unavoidable, but maybe I could have managed it better – or managed expectations better so that during this period people at least stopped asking me for things. But aside from that, being told my work had no value hit me for six, and I spent a week and a half feeling discouraged by that (or, until I had a meeting where someone who understood better what I was doing made it clear that he didn’t think that was the case). Linking my productivity to my self-esteem is not great. Linking my self-esteem to what someone who doesn’t know what I’m doing says about my work, though, is really ridiculous, and I see that now. I should be confident enough in what I’m doing, the value I’m creating, and in the feedback I’m getting from so many other people that this one person doesn’t carry that much weight with me. So I guess I’ll be working on that, too.

  • Scheduling at 80% of Capacity

    Lately, things have been somewhat chaotic. I don’t like it. It makes me stressed, overwhelmed, and unproductive.

    Credit: flikr / kevindooley
    Credit: flikr / kevindooley

    On Saturday, Treena and I headed out of town for breakfast and a chat. We caught up, and I was talking about how I had just hit this point where I was so overwhelmed I was having a hard time being productive. I’m trying to get a grip; I’ve managed to delegate something that was causing me a giant headache and I’ve been trying to do more things that make me happy rather than I feel I should do (this means I’ve finally caught up on this season of Ugly Betty – love that show).

    Credit flikr / flashcurd
    Credit flikr / flashcurd

    However, it’s not enough. At the end of the semester… I think the picture below captures it. It’s like when the snow melts and everything you’ve done all semester needs to be done and final. There’s a cascade of stress, as anything that takes longer than anticipated slides into everything else…

    Credit: flikr / mint imperial
    Credit: flikr / mint imperial

    Treena tells me (I’m paraphrasing here):

    In production, you always schedule at 80% of capacity just in case.

    I try to say that I do, it’s just more has gone wrong than the 20% allocated for. Maybe I’m right – I mean, over 4 hours a week spent on physio at the start of term… there’s 20% right there. Having to remark a whole assignment? That’s 20% and it’s happened twice.

    Then later, I think about it some more, and realize – I don’t know what my capacity is anymore. Some weeks I’ll work 80 hours and be OK with that. Last week I didn’t achieve anywhere near that (I tried to, but I was having terrible problems focusing). I’ve hit the point where my cup is overflowing – and not in a good way.

    Credit: flikr / 96dpi
    Credit: flikr / 96dpi

    So Treena is right – I’ve not been scheduling at 80% of capacity. The fact that I don’t even know what my capacity is anymore, tells me I’ve really screwed things up – I’ve sprinted and crashed. I need to be doing 50 hours every week, not 80 hours one week and 20 the next. I shouldn’t be at the point where what needs to happen this week makes me want to curl into a ball and cry.

    Credit: flikr / hufse
    Credit: flikr / hufse

    It’s probably too late for this semester. If I can get through this week, it’s over. For next semester, what can I do to learn what my 80% is and schedule for that?

    • Working Saturdays – don’t do it. Saturday lunchtime labs screw up my whole weekend, they’ve often overran as well as assignments have been due on Sundays and I feel compelled to stay longer to help.
    • TA-ing period. No TA-ing in French (it’s much more stressful for me), and if I TA at all it will be a “proper” CS course as the obligatory courses for non-CS students are much harder.
    • Delegate before it’s panicking me. I arranged for someone to take charge of something last week that I probably should have arranged a month ago.
    • Better sleep schedule. I was up early for the first chunk of the semester, but then I work late into the evening and it spills over to the following day when I sleep late… need to avoid this and keep on a more regular schedule – especially since the morning is often my most productive time.
    • Do things that make me happy. Read more novels. Go do things I enjoy. Spend time with my boyfriend. I’m 24 – it’s too young to do nothing but work.
    • Email. Takes too much time. Unsubscribe from everything I can. This will include Twitter notifications. I should make a custom Twitter landing page indicating that I don’t check the notifications and that I mostly follow back people who talk to me, so send me an @ message saying hello. Once the end of the semester is over (no more panicked emails from students) I should be able to check it just once a day. Try and move to inbox zero.
    • Courses. Take a course that I enjoy and am interested in. This semester’s course was one I had to take, which definitely made me less motivated. That kind of workload in something I’m more passionate about would not be as big a problem. Spend more time at the beginning of the semester going to a few courses and picking the one that I will enjoy most – this will pay off later.
    • Some tasks get bigger the longer you put them off. Last week, I spent several hours trying to clear my email. On my desk, there’s a pile of paper 6 inches high. At this point, they become so large I need to set aside a lot of time to deal with them. This makes them much more intimidating, and I put them off even longer… it’s a vicious cycle. Try not to get into it in the first place.

    This is everything I can think of for now, but as I try to find my 80% no doubt more will come up. How about you? How do you find your 80%?

  • Overwhelmed

    The thing about focusing on effectiveness, is that everything that I put on “the List” is something I think is important. And then if I get a little behind I end up in a situation where my todo list for today has a time estimate of over 11 hours. And then I panic.

    Today I managed to convince myself that I’d forgotten my wallet. I spent half an hour waiting at the physio for my boyfriend to come by with his credit card (thankfully his office is across the road, but he was in a meeting). And then he rushed off and I walked home to find it. And I did – buried deep inside my backpack between my laptop and a pile of papers that I’ve been carting around for days but haven’t found the time to read.

    By the time I got home I’d calmed down, and when I found my wallet I felt so stupid. I don’t, typically, see myself as a person who forgets important things. However I’d got so frazzled that I had believed it when emptying out my backpack would have shown me that no, I am not that person. I thought about concealing it from my boyfriend, but I opted not to. When I called him to confess, he laughed. For some reason he finds it endearing when I’m really dozy. I think it’s best not to question this.

    Getting overwhelmed is something I need to focus on. When everything is important I don’t prioritize as well as I should do. My “List” is a mix of things that need to happen today, with things that make long-term easier. Such as reading a paper every day – I don’t need to do that today, but when I have to do something like write a project proposal (like I did last week) it only took a couple of hours because I’d laid all the ground work ahead of time – in the piles of annotated papers on my desk and the references organized (with notes) in Zotero.

    So, he’s my plan for staying calm and getting on with things. Because one thing is for sure, when I’m overwhelmed and freaking out, I’m not being productive!

    1. Breathe
    2. Do what’s possible, starting with things that need to happen today
    3. Forgive myself for taking a break (I needed it!)