Do something, rather than any thing
You cannot really tell from this site, as I chose not to use date timestamps on the articles, but I have not written an article in quite some time. I underwent therapy and dealt with a higher than normal workload for quite some time.
After conquering both my mental health and the workload I was thinking why does it happen to me and not to others? It seems people around me that are responsible for managing my workload are just doing any thing all the time. So there is no real thought behind the resource allocation strategy and general return value of the work put in. This means it is chaotic and haphazard all the time. It feels like a bad stop motion film where the speed varies greatly and you get jolted and jittered around.
Two quick examples are I was sick for a spell, nothing major like Covid, but it did take me a week out the running. When I got back I asked, you did inform all the customers there will be a week delay as I did not produce anything for a week. They replied with no. They kind of expected me to work 150% for a bit to make up for it. I refused.
Next example is the fact that I have been signalling multiple weeks the workload is too high, the planning is too tight, there is no room for error or outside bad influences. This all accumulated last week as Debian 11 released. That was something I anticipated but got no time allocation for to prepare and fix. I already started in April of this year, and now I had to finish up everything in August real quick with all the risk of forgetting to spot something and therefore not really fix it. Also this week someone was on holiday, yet they did not think of getting a replacement. They did not communicate to a customer that the test environment was going to be delayed, as they discussed with me would be the plan. Next thing I know I get a message on Slack asking when the test env is up? I said I am not working on it currently due to priorities being shifted. The customer said he did not know and it was it not discussed with them.
So I said to the people responsible for my workload, please think before you do things. You got to do something, not any thing. It is the same for me as a DevOps engineer, software engineer, software architect, cloud architect and who knows what other roles I have over the almost 10 projects I have to simultaneously run. I don't just do any thing I think of, I make a strategic plan and I try to run through some scenarios to make sure it works in them as I expect. As a general advice try to think of what it is you have to do and sketch out a plan. Could be a holiday trip, you can think of what if they don't have the accommodation you wanted, the weather is not really that suited for the activities, the WiFi does not work or what have you. Then you might come up with some alternate solutions to deal with the problems and you are better prepared and less likely to fall into disappointment when something does not go your way, more importantly it does not feel chaotic to the whole party as there is a streamlined way out of it. The memories of that holiday trip will be great instead of well that trip was a bit meh.