rest and improvement(?)
Feb. 5th, 2023 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishI am doing better.
Thank you to everyone who commented on my previous post. The support was greatly appreciated.
This sense of breakdown and brainfog is strongly correlated with work, with being expected / expecting myself to be doing more and better and to be operating at a generally higher level. I've been tech writing for well over a decade and a half, and working pretty independently for much of that, and having some sort of high-level responsibility for medium-to-large projects for, oh, call it four years (not continuous). And now I'm struggling to keep up with basic tasks.
Some of it's certainly that the environment doesn't work for me: meetings every morning at seven (or 6:30) and minimum one night a week at 8:30 or 9, what seems like a neverending stream of new priorities, and in-my-experience-excessive shifts to release deadlines and release contents which make it difficult to know what to write about for a release. Some of it's struggling with wholly new things: I've never created a video before, or put together a pre-writing plan in this particular way. And some of it's complicated bureaucratic tracking and meetings and company policies and procedures that I just don't feel like I have a handle on after being there for almost a year.
And a lot of it's a difficulty in maintaining focus on the task at hand. Or in many cases directing it to the task at hand. "Okay, I'm gonna get started on this." *five minutes pass* "Okay, I'm really gonna get started on this." etc.
I am scared it might be a long-covid-type of thing. I am also scared that it's just my brain being broken, or that six years in an extremely slack job has worn down my ability to function at an appropriate level.
I talked about some of this with my boss on Thursday night, and she's sympathetic, and I (and I believe everyone) will be focusing on tasks-for-the-next-release for a couple of weeks and picking up random-misc-tasks after that. That should help. And I have done Not A Damn Thing this weekend, which seems to have been needed. (I slept poorly last night, short periods of wakefulness interspersed with an ongoing and stupid dream about talking or trying to talk to Emily.) So maybe things will improve? We shall see what the week brings, I guess.
But: again, thank you.
Edit: AHAHAHAHA no, we're all still expected to juggle as many items as possible, I'm just temporarily juggling one fewer. Dammit.
Thank you to everyone who commented on my previous post. The support was greatly appreciated.
This sense of breakdown and brainfog is strongly correlated with work, with being expected / expecting myself to be doing more and better and to be operating at a generally higher level. I've been tech writing for well over a decade and a half, and working pretty independently for much of that, and having some sort of high-level responsibility for medium-to-large projects for, oh, call it four years (not continuous). And now I'm struggling to keep up with basic tasks.
Some of it's certainly that the environment doesn't work for me: meetings every morning at seven (or 6:30) and minimum one night a week at 8:30 or 9, what seems like a neverending stream of new priorities, and in-my-experience-excessive shifts to release deadlines and release contents which make it difficult to know what to write about for a release. Some of it's struggling with wholly new things: I've never created a video before, or put together a pre-writing plan in this particular way. And some of it's complicated bureaucratic tracking and meetings and company policies and procedures that I just don't feel like I have a handle on after being there for almost a year.
And a lot of it's a difficulty in maintaining focus on the task at hand. Or in many cases directing it to the task at hand. "Okay, I'm gonna get started on this." *five minutes pass* "Okay, I'm really gonna get started on this." etc.
I am scared it might be a long-covid-type of thing. I am also scared that it's just my brain being broken, or that six years in an extremely slack job has worn down my ability to function at an appropriate level.
I talked about some of this with my boss on Thursday night, and she's sympathetic, and I (and I believe everyone) will be focusing on tasks-for-the-next-release for a couple of weeks and picking up random-misc-tasks after that. That should help. And I have done Not A Damn Thing this weekend, which seems to have been needed. (I slept poorly last night, short periods of wakefulness interspersed with an ongoing and stupid dream about talking or trying to talk to Emily.) So maybe things will improve? We shall see what the week brings, I guess.
But: again, thank you.
Edit: AHAHAHAHA no, we're all still expected to juggle as many items as possible, I'm just temporarily juggling one fewer. Dammit.