The world is weird. Learn to accept this.
This post is a bit different. It feels right. It is personal and that is part of work too. Saying “it’s just business” doesn’t make it so. Everything is personal.
The world is in a weird state and it affects us all. I find I’m looking at my regular news sites more frequently, and wonder what new weird thing the orange one did overnight. The biggest effect I notice is feeling tired more than I remember. I suspect it is the result of thinking about all of these weird things and how they might impact me, family and friends as I play through options in my head and discuss them with the family.
When everything feels stressful there are a number of things that you can do to make it more manageable. There are no silver bullets, but you can try them to see how they work for you and your people.
It took me some time to realise it was emotions that were doing their thing. Think about whether that’s the case with you too. Name the feelings, or concerns you have. Explore them a bit and see where you feel them in your body. Breathe in, breathe out focusing on your breath and feel where the emotion sits.
Do something beyond acceptance
Beyond acceptance you can take a few other steps to manage things. They will probably not resolve everything, but be small steps in the right direction.
First, explore what you can do that is in your control. If the price of heating, fuel, food, or something else has you concerned, then look at alternatives. Do you have space to store more food at home, so you can stockpile some? Or is now the time to consider using more public transport, or to get a bicycle so you get more exercise too?
If you do what you can, then you will have ‘done something’. More importantly, you took the time to think about this, so it is easier to rest. You also started to think proactively, which changes your perception of the issue. Your subconscious will also keep thinking about this too, so you’ll find more ideas emerge later.
Second, talk to people. Bottling up your thoughts will only make this worse. Set up some social sessions with people in your network. I have fortnightly random coffee sessions with people in a Slack group, which are great for this sort of talk, as well as a chance to discuss work-type things too.
Third, work in small batches so that you feel you’re making progress. Yes, it might not be complete, but you’ll see progress. If you combine this with making your work interruptible, then if things become too much, it is easy to safely pause.
Lastly, get outside. The sunshine and exercise of walking, cycling, gardening, whatever all help.
Talk to your people
Be aware that if these weird times bother you, that you’re probably not alone. Try these out yourself, but also share them with your team. Share them with your family too. These are hard times and some people will be keeping their emotions bottled up.
The perfect excuse to have a hot/cold beverage with someone. Blame me if it helps.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.