The One with Dinosaurs
February is almost gone and I haven’t posted a single time this year. I made some really structured plans, with work goals and lots of little tasks but I completely forgot to think about this blog.
And then my favourite coworker told me he’d quit in the middle of January. He has gotten a pretty cool offer and he’s been with Studitemps for 8 1⁄2 years so it’s definitely great for him and very understandable, but it was a bit of a shock for me. He’s already gone now, so it was just a month between knowing he’d go and saying goodbye. And I decided to use these few weeks to really latch onto him, to really get the most out of this time. So all my schedules and goals went a bit out of the window for a while. I’m slowly getting back to it now but I’m just not back to normal so I’m taking it a bit more slowly.
I’m still adjusting to not having my anchor person around all the time, and I decided to quit smoking at the same time, so 2 of my stress outlets are missing and I haven’t found the right replacements just yet. Which is especially annoying because I have a bit too much on my plate right now, my mental load is definitely not on balance and I’m just more stressed than I’ve been used to in the last few months. Which is why I decided to dig out a book that’s been on my tbr pile pretty much since I started working at Studitemps: Dinosaur Brains by Albert J. Bernstein. Someone recommended it to me as a book software devs should read (I have no idea who), I immediately bought it and had never started reading it. I’m reading it now and so far I really like it. I’ve read a lot of books that deal with stress reactions already, so there is not a lot that’s really new in this, but I dig the writing style and the format and specificity of the suggestions for dealing with certain problems/situations.
Next on my to-do list: Do some more research on the problems of mental load and context switching, write a bit more on this here and do a Learning Hour session on it, in order to learn a bit more about it for myself. But first, weekend!