There are weeks where things pile up and it's hard to disentangle. Weeks where everything feels like too much and you start questioning yourself. Weeks where you've learned a lot but haven't realised it yet.
It's a busy period. Just carving out the time to write this has been a challenge. No real emergencies, but I'm in the middle of a large, complex piece of feature work. The UI is slick, which means a lot of logic underneath to make the experience feel smooth and intuitive. The whole team has put enormous effort into this, and now it's on me to deliver.
Alongside that, there are ongoing discussions and workshops about the next set of features, scoping out the framework we'll use for our own agentic work, exploring opportunities to bring value in other parts of the company. The future looks genuinely interesting. But there's a lot moving at once.
All of this lands on top of a period of change within the team. New people joining, familiar colleagues moving on or being moved internally. The level is still high, but there are mechanisms to calibrate and relationships to build from scratch. That takes energy too, even when it's going well.
The result has been a few weeks where I've felt, honestly, a bit overwhelmed.
Not bad or tragic. But when you have enough experience, you recognise when something is off in how you're working and approaching things. I've known it for a while. Luckily, I also know myself well enough to understand what's happening.
The feeling is something like this: swimming in an ocean of things to do and learn, loving the scenery, but struggling to breathe sometimes. You catch a small break and a wave pushes you back deeper than before.
The output hasn't suffered, which is worth noting. The tickets I've been working on have gone well and produced systems I think will genuinely make a difference to users. The logic was complex, and building something that shields that complexity without becoming brittle was hard but satisfying work. In the meantime the team is settling well. The company attracts good people, and the new arrivals have integrated quickly and brought things with them that have made the group better. That was expected, and still good to see.
In the past, I would have handled this worse. My brain would have switched into emergency mode, made everything more dramatic and absolute than it was, and started a spiral that made things worse by the hour. Now I know who I am and what I'm capable of. Even in the harder moments, when doubt creeps in, I have an anchor, a store of evidence I can return to when the noise gets too loud.
The approach is straightforward, even if it doesn't always feel that way. Don't give up, but don't overcompensate either. Get back to the basics: eat properly, sleep well, train. Mental clarity follows. With clarity comes the ability to see which of the open things is actually driving most of the stress, and to act on that specifically rather than trying to solve everything at once. Fix the thing that's causing the unease and the rest begins to settle on its own.
The last ingredient is time. I know I tend to see things in a darker light than they usually deserve. Small actions, patience, letting things breathe. A conversation, a small win, a shift in perspective. Things look different after a few days than they do in the thick of it.
Am I feeling better yet? Not quite. But writing this was one of the steps, a way to look at the moment from a slight distance and see it more clearly. It looks less daunting from here. That's something.