September has been quite the week. 😯
It’s one of those times when the culmination of things either rumbling in perpetuity or looming in the distance have me feeling very overwhelmed and woefully unproductive. A perfect storm of anxiety and depression and a little despair, and as much as I push to just get through each day, it’s there waiting for me again whenever I finally wake up the next day…
I’m currently in the process of replacing my entire team (of 2) at work after one sadly passed away this summer and the other resigned to move on to something new. This is the first time I’ve ever hired anyone, so I’m a little apprehensive about that, but I think more so trying to figure out how my team will work going forward as I transition from experienced engineers to people who are brand new and will require a lot more hands on support from me.
On top of that, it seems like everything is breaking at work quicker than we can fix it, which is equally daunting with my last teammate leaving in just a couple of short weeks.
Next week I also have to do a sleep study, which is basically an insurance technicality to confirm that I still have the sleep apnea that was diagnosed 10+ years ago so that they’ll pay for a replacement CPAP machine for me. This has me anxious because in order for the test to be accurate, I have to go off my machine for three nights, meaning that I’m going to be tired and groggy and miserable because by now I know that I get absolute garbage sleep without it.
Seriously, as much as I hate using the thing, I know that I can’t sleep without it – even naps on the couch leave me feeling more tired than when I lay down – but it’s something that I have to endure because I’ve had just the one machine this entire time and apparently I’m lucky that it didn’t die on me years ago!
And of course, all of this has driven both my time as well as my desire for writing into the ground, which sucks because before it really hit a few weeks ago, I was just starting to make some progress on a few things again. 🙁
It hasn’t all been negative recently, however, as I’ve managed to get a handful of random projects done in an effort to distract myself from all of the other stress:
- I rewired and did some necessary cable management behind the TV in our living room.
- I added 10-gigabit NICs to two of my servers at home, and was reminded something important about troubleshooting in the process. “Correlation does not mean causation!”
- I also crawled up into the attic and routed the cable so that I could finally mount our wifi access point to the ceiling.
- I made a small, but pivotal dent in starting to clean our garage.
- And I think I might’ve finally found a solution for managing our kids’ iPads to make that whole process a little less cumbersome. (more on this soon!)
We’re also just today getting a bunch of deliveries to give our playroom/Sara’s school room a much needed overhaul, so even though it’s going to mean a lot of work for me this weekend tearing down all of my old Lego shelves and putting together new bookshelves from Ikea, I’m looking forward to the end result and seeing that room transform into something a little more organized and less cluttered.
I feel like right now the best I can do is choose one or two things a day to focus on, and then in the meantime just do what I can to keep everything else at bay until such time that I can give them the attention that they actually need. I know that with some of this stuff, in particular hiring, I realistically won’t feel great about until probably six months after I hire people and build up a new rapport working with them, so some of this stress is here for the long haul.
Albeit more slowly than I would like, things will eventually get done and one by one I can start to put more of this stuff behind me … and then new things will present themselves to take their place, and we can start this whole mess all over again!
Well, hopefully not as overwhelmingly next time, mind you. 😛
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