Background

Recently, for the past 1 month, I dreaded going to office and felt so overwhelmed with what is going on. I still love my job, I just feel the way I execute it is problematic. I spent evenings and weekends working non stop and still felt unsatisfied.

Reflection

Today, I sat down and wrote what really happened in the past 1 month, including task details and time taken. The format looks like this:

Forcing myself writing down the details really made me reflect on what tasks I could’ve focused (and vice versa), what task types worn me down. I’m trying to balance the input — my attention and output — team’s objectives.

Below are where I had issues:

1. Coordination task: As a PM, my main value add to the project is stakeholder management, aka coordination. However, coordination chops my attention into minced meat. There is so much back and forth waiting, reminding, clarifying with stakeholders to make decisions. Mentally, I don’t know if there’s a better way to handle such activity. For the past 1 month, I technically handled 4–5 small to medium projects and coordination really drove me nuts. I felt like I spent 8 hours at work just to do coordination. For me, coordination doesn’t give me concrete deliverables (i.e. it’s just people talking), so I felt super unsatisfied after spending so many hours.

2. Meeting preparation: As a PM, I organise and host a lot of meetings. My style is efficiency and I really require attendees to prepare prior to meetings, especially brainstorming sessions. At the same time, if I’m the one who presents, I will need to prepare slides and data. The pressure in team level meeting is lesser than management one. For such management meetings (1–2 meetings per month), I could spend up to half a day preparing. And I’m working on 2 teams so the time doubled. But again, I really wonder what is the benefit of such meetings. That’s why I felt unjustified with the time spent.

3. Execution: Fortunately and unfortunately, I know basic coding so I am not blocked when there are testing/experimenting tasks. Because I’m so time-sensitive, if I see delegating such tasks to engineers result in delay, I would take it upon myself. Most of the time, my coding level would make do, but it took longer than expected and won’t create a completed solution. Another issue is that I have to know all the nitty gritty details in order to implement. Funnily, I switched my mind from thinking about team’s future to investigating why the icon is not aligned properly. No wonder I felt tired.

What should I do?

1. I want to cultivate mindfulness and estimate my capabilities better. I should be aware of what I’m currently working on and supposed to work before taking any other tasks onto my plate.
2. I should scream for help if this is getting out of control. That’s the perk of working in group. I rather fail fast than letting the team bearing the failure with me.
3. During the day, there are times I lose focus on if I’m supposed to do coordination or execution now and get overwhelmed because there are so many things to do. I’m just thinking if there is a to do list extension (I’m currently using Papier) that reflects my mind, my situation, and how much time I’m spending (or supposed to spend) on a task. So at one look, I can tell which task I should spend time.