[valyagolev]

about self-management:

I've been finding myself in similar roles, and one thing to keep in mind is that the constant feeling of not being productive enough is rarely helpful. So focus on your real output and consider it as already enough.

If you're the only one person in this role and you have to manage yourself, it means you're quite indispensable and you should start to define your own process that would be good for your real productivity and sensible and legible to the whole company.

It might sounds scary, but actually such a step very often ends up being quite welcome by everyone around, who are now have much better idea of your real availability and can have an input into real, not imaginary, prioritisation of your work.

Not sure about the reviews, though. Never figured that one out for solo in the role. However, after you start self-managing it's much easier for the management to notice when you need some help. Then someone gets hired and you have a reviewer around.

[throw_devops_q]

100% I think you're right. I've been meaning to have a more defined process for some time now, and plan to get everything into our ticketing system soon. It just always feels like a choice between administrative work and overdue work, and I usually choose the latter. Hopefully when it's all in there I can just spend 10-15 minutes per day to keep it up-to-date.