Recovering from stress¶

Tags: nelenschuurmans, python

Last year I laid all sorts of nice plans (in my yearly personal develoment plan) but it all got laid to waste by a full change of (company) direction. Poof went my plans. Plans for my own direction, plans for teamwork, plans for lots of improvements. That’s life. And such a problematic year gives its own opportunities for learning and improvement.

As an example of such an opportunity: somewhere in october I was quite stressed.

I didn’t agree with the direction we were taking. It was starting to take its toll on my health (mostly my back muscles acting up). Now… how to get out of it? My recipe was to tell it to my direct boss and to get his permission to take a couple of afternoons off to cycle a bit. Of course I got the permission (that’s the good thing about where I work!) and spend some 6 afternoons cycling within two weeks time.

That really helped clear my mind (and my body). And at about the same time I started an all-new internal project: a relatively straightforward internal Django timekeeping app. Lots of work and lots of tweaking, but at least a stressless productive programming assignment. Just coming up with a good architecture, a good css layout, some nice and proper code and yeah, I was happy again.

So… I think the lesson for me is that giving early feedback is important. And the company earned some bonus points for actually being happy with me for telling about my problems and coming up myself with a simple way to fix/reduce it.