I need advice on something. 2020 has not been a great year for a lot of us. I have spent almost 11 months inside our tiny 2 bedroom apartment in the middle of Queens, New York; the epicenter of the pandemic here in the east coast. We have been on lock down quarantine for the longest time and I personally have not had any desire to go out. I even hold the local record for staying indoors for over 100 days straight before stepping out the front door just to see the front gate. Not an easy feat considering we live in NYC which has notoriously small living space even for a 2 bedroom apartment. Those were very hopeful times that now feels like a 100 years ago.

Now it’s 2021, a year into the pandemic that changed our world. Even before the pandemic started I have been working on an already stressful project as it has been late to delivery before I even got there. Now we are pushing close to 2 years in additional development. I can see the end though and it is very close. There is a light that beckons to me at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I have to be honest, this is probably the only time in my career where I felt that I am exhausted mentally. I have a never quit attitude but this project along with the new abnormal of working from home and not having much options to get away from it all has made me realize I am doing something wrong.

I have a bad habit of not using up all my vacation leaves. I have been doing it for decades and I keep telling myself every start of the new year that I am going to do better. Spoiler alert, I never do. But 2020 is different. Late in the year I realized that I had to make sure I use every single one of my vacation days. I knew that I probably won’t be able to considering how much needs to be delivered for the project. Knowing I had almost 3 weeks of vacation days left I started scheduling Mondays off so I would at least use up some of it before they expire at the end of the year. There were some Mondays where I was able to really ignore work but as we got closer to the end of the year I was just kidding myself and still ended up working on Mondays. You have to be a special kind of crazy to be personally compelled to work even if you know you need a mental vacation.

You have to be a special kind of crazy to be personally compelled to work even if you know you need a mental vacation.

Mad Computer Scientist

I powered thru the rest of December only taking 1 actual day off as most of the team was out. I had always enjoyed working late December as there was not a lot of people in the office. That just meant a lot less meetings for me. But like everything in 2020, this felt very different. I started to feel uneasy having to spend so much time working and troubleshooting all by myself. It felt like there was just too much responsibility on my shoulders and that I was alone. It was a feeling I never had before. I started to feel like I was being cheated and wronged by being in this situation. A situation that I had put myself in to begin with. I had no one else to blame but myself which made that resentful feeling much worse.

Earlier in this project I thought my problem was because I was a control freak. Ok, I know that is one of the many problems I have. I had to be involved at the most detailed level of development for me to understand the bigger picture. I trusted my team but I always needed to verify that what everyone was doing was correct. Even if we ended up with some implementation that was not satisfactory, I was still involved and understood why it ended up that way. That made me feel in control and gave me a handle of how much effort is needed to complete things. This set me up to be invaluable to the team as I can take on any task in the project because I was literally involved in every minute piece of it. I tried to let go of some of that responsibility as I was being stretched too thin to be effective at anything but that only resulted in me feeling more helpless. I found a sort of balance by off loading all the daily coordination and tracking work to an actual scrum lead. This meant that I stopped running the daily update calls and tried to minimize my air time so I can try to be more focused on technical tasks at hand and helping other developers. My thought process was that I needed to only focus on development and not the tracking of progress. This went well until we started to get into a UAT cycle.

The UAT cycle was going to take me away from development work as users would require a daily update report of the status of defect fixes and other UAT related issues. We would already spend an hour or so in the stand up just discussing what needs to be addressed today to then only have another hour or so discussion at the end of the day to catch up on what was fixed and ready to retest for users the next day. My biggest issue with this process was this was mostly done over the phone with some supporting jira documentation which was prone to interpretation by those expected to deliver the update to users on the next day. Nothing is more frustrating than discussing something for hours and still be asked to join an early UAT status meeting to explain yourself again while expecting that actual work will be done. I had resorted to dodging these long calls and just coordinating status updates on jira or email. The pencil pushers hated this. I understood their frustration as I must admit most of my updates are ramblings that only developers would actually understand because of the level of detail and nuance I write the updates. I was writing updates for developers, not for pencil pushers or users.

Nothing is more frustrating than discussing something for hours and still be asked to join an early UAT status meeting to explain yourself again while expecting that actual work will be done.

Mad Computer Scientist

During the last couple of months I have also started to resent people texting me about work. This was more egregious if it was done during time off at the end of the day, weekends or holidays. My constant attitude of being ready and willing to work no matter the circumstance has trained everyone that I am always available and open to work discussions. I started to feel being taken advantage of even though I knew people are just worried about meeting deadlines. I had started to view work as something I needed to switch off which has never been a concept for me until now. This created a cognitive dissonance as I am always compelled to work by nature but now feel like I shouldn’t. In the past I have shown up for work even during holidays because it was nice to have time to focus on just what you want to get done that day instead of having to talk to people. I always tell people when they ask why I was working on a holiday “It’s a holiday! I will do whatever I want to do with my time!”

At the start of 2021 I told myself I will no longer compromise with my holidays and vacation leaves. I scheduled a week off for the end of January and plan to keep that promise. Of course the very first public holiday of the year MLK day came and guess what I did? I worked 14 hours that day. Good job! That scheduled week off is also now starting to worry me as I get closer to it. I know there are critical items to be worked on but I am going to do my best not to worry about it. I’ve also decided that I won’t take any more texts or calls during my down time. I have promised to block anyone on my phone who would violate that rule. I know that the justification for a text is that I can choose to respond to it if I wanted to. But I know I have issues and would not be able to keep it off my mind so I will be ruthless with this rule no matter what.

This brings me back to the start of this post. I need advice. I need to reconcile this need of having work boundaries while at the same time knowing I am a workaholic. I feel I have reached a level of diminishing return and my usual strategy of just diving in more head first thinking that the finish line is close at hand is making me more resentful of the thing I actually love doing. How do you convince an addict that what they are doing to themselves is slowly killing their purpose?