Reflections on recent changes in work place

What I'm lacking; how to improve

The last few weeks have been tough. The problem seems to originate from all three avenues: life, work, and the social circle. My child is demanding that I play with her more regularly and for more time. By size, my social circle is small. I feel the size further shrinks due to my inability to speak or interact with my close friends. Even though the friends usually accept the fact that life is getting busier, the crack appears nonetheless.

When digging deeper for the root cause, I realized the lack of time management was the culprit. Whatever task I try to accomplish may be misaligned in the urgent vs. priority graph.

Change in job role

Recently, I got a change in role, coming in from the leadership team. The new role demands that I get the work done on multiple projects. This is more as a lead data engineer.

Data engineering is something I have been doing since 2017 or so. Managing projects has been part of my work since 2019. However, those are limited to a single project. I know what I and my team are doing on this particular project. Things took a turn in the second half of last year. Along with my primary project, one more got added up.

The added responsibility didn’t impact me since there is a clear definition between primary and secondary projects. Also, my satisfaction lies in solving a problem via coding. That indeed left my productivity untouched, as the secondary project solely depends on me. Things were going well until mid-February. 

During this time, I was asked to drive one more project. This newly added responsibility requires more time to run behind the stakeholders, organize a team, and report back to leadership.

When the tide goes down.

You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. - Warren Buffett

This is a very popular one from the Oracle of Omaha. The saying emphasizes risk management, or the lack of it. 

One of the aspects of risk management for an individual is the way they fine-tune their process. It’s like a technical debt, but for the process. Can we call it process debt? (Is that even a term?)

The debt I failed to repay until now is the ability to delegate work and prioritize a task based on its urgency and impact. It was all going good. I was naked. Now exposed, thanks to the low tide. 

What should I do next?

The important things I need to do 

  1. Prioritizing the tasks
  2. delegating and getting things done by the team

Tasks that get assigned can never be urgent. If that is the case, something is not right. Besides, tasks must be ordered in order of their importance and handled. We always have 24 hours, and squeezing more into our to-do list is never going to help. 

Some work needs to be done only by me. Some things do not necessarily need you to fulfill them; those should be delegated to your team to recover your time.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

I assumed the above statement is a universal truth, but it is not.

We all understand the importance of insurance. If we apply the above statement strictly, we shouldn’t have insurance, as our life or health are already good; why fix it?

Most of the time, we need to improve the process in order to get ourselves ready for the next challenge. We cannot be complacent about things going well. We need to look for possibilities to improve. Effeciency is what matters.

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Page last updated on: 2024-11-06 09:30:05 +0530 +0530
Git commit: a98b4d9


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