It was not a long time ago that I started feeling overwhelmed at work. I felt I had a big plate filled with many things that I needed to take care of immediately and I had no power to handle them. It looked like a simple task was taking forever to be done for some unknown reasons. I was constantly blaming myself for not meeting the deadlines for some reasons that I could not see. The more I insisted on working, the harder it got to accomplish tasks. Soon it started to spread to my personal life, and I found myself having nightmares about our services at work. When I opened up about this matter with the team later, I found out that it is not new in our job and it already has a name: burnout
Mehiläinen health center definition of burnout:
A burnout is a condition, that develops as a consequence of prolonged work stress.
If the workload is divided among a smaller group of people, individual workers cannot hold on to the same quality of work, which they are used to. For a very diligent worker, cutting from the quality of the work and having to deal with more unfinished work than before are risk factors for a burnout
Which is describing my case. I found myself dealing with so many things after the size of our team shrunk several times in preceding months.
As soon as I started talking about my problem, I got various supports from the team including the encouragement to visit specialists and take sick leave to focus on recovery. If you have ever experienced burnout you may agree with me that leaving the work that caused you this level of stress for days might seem scary. You already have the stress of missing deadlines and then you are asked to leave them and take rests. It is scary, but you have to do it.
I got sick leave for a week and then got arranged by our occupational health doctor to visit a psychologist to discuss ways to avoid getting into the same situation in the future. Not gonna lie, the sick leave indeed helped further than I ever imagined. On the first two days of my sick leave, I slept for around 17 hours. I literally just woke up to eat and then got back to sleep. My body was so tired that it started overrunning my mind and kept me in bed. But the point I am writing this post is about the second help I got from the psychologist.
Before I continue with my story, let me first define the word daybook. This is a new term I faced recently when I was reading “Pragmatic Programmer” book, written by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. An engineering daybook apparently is widely used by electrical and mechanical engineers and it is:
a kind of journal in which they recorded what they did, things they’d learned, sketches of ideas, readings from meters: basically anything to do with their work
Simple, right? Engineers write down whatever related to their work in a journal. For me it was a familiar act too. I used to make daily reports on my past jobs, a quick summary of what I did, what made me stuck, and what I will do during next days. All written for the management in short and non-technical manner and sent via email every evening before leaving. The same concept, more or less, is what a daily standup in Agile teams are made for, but I found it quite less effective than making written reports.
Back to my story of burnout, when I first met the psychologist to discuss ways to prevent a new burnout in the future, we explored many different approaches. Things like using prescribed sleeping medicine if needed and two important things, one of which was the idea of a personal worklog at the end of the day. Personal as I am the only audience and it is not asked or supposed to be presented to anyone else. But how did that help me?
I am a person of writing, if that is an expression! I like to write down things: appointments, meeting notes, day-to-day tasks, and everything that can be recorded in a written format. I always have had a journal in which I write my emotions, my upcoming events, my yearly goals and dreams except one thing: work-related matters. The idea of making a personal worklog at first seemed just like a trial-and-error attempt and I didn’t expect it to work. But guess what! It has worked very well.
The first thing I keep in mind is KISS, keep it simple, stupid. I open my work-account MS-Loop, create a “workspace idea” for a week, make headlines for each day, and then write down bullets based on what I am going to do. Simple, yet elegant. But it doesn’t end here. I constantly re-arrange bullets, mark them as done or add sub-bullets if necessary. More often than not, I found myself adding bullets about things that happened but were not planned ahead, like a meeting or maintenance work, which consequently moves other bullets down the list or even to the next weeks.
Weekly Report - 1
Monday - 30.12
- Add terraform module for S3 for project A
- Meeting about handover the project B to team X
Tuesday - 31.12
- Support ticket for project C
- Add pipeline step for the new terraform module
Wednesday - 1.1 (HOLIDAY)
Thursday - 2.1 (HOLIDAY)
Friday - 3.1
- Make PR
- Deploy terraform module on CI
Week 2:
- Deploy to STG
- Deploy to PRD
You are free to choose the style that works for you, but even with this simple example above you can see in one look that I was unable to complete the work for the terraform module due to an unplanned meeting, which then pushed the work down the stream, and the new year holidays and support tickets eventually led to STG, PRD deployments being postponed to next week. Unlike before, now I have an explanation for why I was unable to accomplish this task, not for anyone else but myself only. It is helping me to have a plan for upcoming days which can subsequently help my team to organize better. I can discuss these surprises during the next meeting and make it clear that the work on the module might be delayed. Soon, I will gain the insight on how to be more accurate on next estimates as I gain experiences like this.
A personal worklog, or a daybook, is a simple step toward being more productive and healthy. It doesn’t take much time to make one for yourself, and soon you’ll see the benefits. You can review your worklog at least once per day, before shutting off your machine. Read it first thing in the morning to recover the work state, and even talk about them with the team during your standup. Take care of yourself and don’t let the stress win!