2 posts tagged “stress”

What keeps you up at night?

this month, work stress has been keeping me up at night. ive been working with a particular business unit in my company to get some content ready for their section of the site. i set deadlines, resources and a time line. they aimed at the 24th. not sure why, but thats what they wanted. anyway, they missed all their deadlines, they dont deliver the content i need to post and im basically holding their hands through their own project. its a real pain in the ass.

i gave them a deadline of this morning or else the 24th wont be reached. after they hand over the content, they call me up saying they want more changes to be done. the content is on rev9 now. how many times do you really need to write up a few pages of text? soooo disorganized. theres about nine writers in this project. the point of contact has changed around through 10 different people now. its stressing me out because i know my team will get yelled at if this doesnt work out. i dont understand how its our bad when these kids arent doing their hw, but thats how the breaks are out here. annoying as shit.

I've been at my current for more than half a year now and I've been getting in the grove of things. My role has been almost completely defined, I've set a few goals, and I take on responsibilities as needed, or as necessary.

One of the first things I was told when I got here was, "It's very fast paced." Now, I took this on with open arms. The stress level at my last job was pretty rough at first. I got used to it. It's all about being organized and managing my time accordingly. I went from managing 2-3 campaigns to a week, to managing as high as 20 campaigns a week. I would end each day knowing I put a hard day in, whether it was the full 8 hours, or the occasional 10-12. In any case, I learned how to deal with stress and high workloads.

So when I was told about the face paced environment here, I thought "bring it on!" Now that its been 8 months, I've noticed that I haven't stressed much at all. No matter the load, I get all my work done in a timely manner. When I look at my team, the other person that I don't see stress out is the other web guy. Everyone else seems to run around like  a headless chicken when its crunch time.

What inspired me to write this post is hearing my friend stressing out at her job. All it took was one night. She came over for dinner and spoke nonstop about her job, complaining about everything she could think of. The type of stuff she had on her plate sounded pretty interesting and challenging. I figured, hey, she's only been there for 3 months, its gotta be just hype. Then again, I don't really know what's going on. I took alot of roles at my first job and I'd complain alot. But my complaints were focused mostly around my manager and how she'd treat me like her little bitch. So then I thought, maybe she just wants to brag about her job and what she does there, and this is the way she shares that.

I've seen quite a few people act like this in my short time as a yuppie. People grocery listing their tasks and action items in the form of woes and cries. Maybe its just a form of stress-management. When it happens here at my current job, I will admit, it gets contagious. I don't stress out, but I do feel the pressure when one person is going nuts.

So back to my point, maybe I'm over it, maybe I just manage myself well, or maybe, I'm just not at that work level to receive that level of stress yet. I guess if the latter is the case, I'll just have to wait and see. For now, I'd like to thank my last job at AD for teaching me how to handle this level of work with ease.