[meaydinli]

I am going through this right now. I have constant tension headaches and doc says I should stay away from stress, stress triggers and chocolate/coffee/etc. How am I supposed to do that with work/life/COVID and everything 2020?

I have a big project on me, and there is no way I can get the rest I need to recover properly. I took 2 days off, and my colleagues are rallying to help as much as they can, but some of the info is silo'd on me so I need to work on it.

[tenebrisalietum]

> but some of the info is silo'd on me

What's preventing you from sharing this information or making it accessible to your other colleagues?

[meaydinli]

Thank you, that is a good question. I haven't thought of it from that POV. Nothing is preventing me aside from my work-load, and the feeling that I am letting everybody down every second this project is further delayed.

[nitrogen]

I'm paraphrasing a story whose origin I can't remember at the moment, but basically if you have 6 hours to chop down a very large tree, you should spend 5 of those hours sharpening your axe.

[rzzzt]

Quote Investigator is a good site to go for origin stories of a quote (the number of suggested hours/minutes for axe sharpening varies wildly): https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/29/sharp-axe/

[IggleSniggle]

I'm suddenly feeling a little better about all the time I spend investigating better/different ways to approach technical problems, even when I know that I can't apply them to the problem that is immediately in front of me.

I mean, obviously at some point you need to cut down the tree, and sometimes you're just carving down your ax without making it any sharper, but still.

[zo1]

It's a crap cake most times I try the long-approach on a problem:

I spend time researching, investigating, figuring out the best way to do it, implementing the solution and potentially being pulled off to something else in the meantime. And then comes along some spiffy "throw hammer at the problem" person that can't stand spending too much time on a problem, who then proceeds to solve it in some crappy way that "kinda works". Then goes ahead and convinces everyone to go with it because "hey it's already done and kinda works and why throw away work", nevermind the "work" you did figuring it out and them not even bothering to ask you for your info (or downright ignoring it because it wasn't quick enough for their way of operating).

And then when you raise it with management, you get told to "call a meeting" to discuss the issue with the team in such a way that precludes the need for management to get directly involved and tell that other person to sit down and listen - because hey "they're a code ninja that gets shit done" and look at all these things they've done.

Oh and we generally have to spend weeks afterwards fixing all the corner cases they never bothered to think about or investigate. And more meetings get called to discuss it instead of them just listening to you telling them what the solutions are. Because hey, the whole team has to have a say right? We wouldn't want them to think their opinion doesn't matter. 50/50 chance of that, or we end up rewriting it after we come to the realization that the solution sucks, but that code-ninja has already moved along to the next team where "they urgently need help of someone that can just get things done".

/rant

[whatshisface]

You could try becoming the person who jumps in and gets it done badly in one minute. The fact that you spend a lot of time researching the problem isn't a personal trait, it's something that you can choose to do or not do depending on the circumstances. The easiest way to extricate yourself from your present problem is to do what management wishes you were doing (perhaps a wish without full understanding of the consequences.)

[rconti]

When I was reading about 'dog' command-line DNS resolver here yesterday, I was thinking "who on earth has time to constantly investigate, install dependencies for, install, test, maintain, remember to use, etc, all these whiz-bang utilities I see posted here all the time?"

Maybe I'm stuck in first gear :)

[HomeDeLaPot]

I think I've heard it attributed to Abe Lincoln. I imagine he didn't mean to sharpen it all up front, but after every few swings.

[pmiller2]

That story is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, IIRC. It may be apocryphal.

[jrumbut]

I know this is basically impossible, but often everyone is better off if they know in advance something is impossible to maintain/accomplish.

I've made this mistake plenty of times and been in situations where it was easy to prevent early in the cycle, so I'm sure if this was an easy environment it would be, well, easy.

[crucialfelix]

I do this too. Try scheduling 30 min or 1 hour to write docs or specs to share the knowledge in your head. Just that activity will help you to psychologically move the project off your shoulders.

I did a lot of work these past months and now my team is able to use that code, fix bugs and get things done faster and safer. That's the motivation you want to feel.