[tarruda]

Is your manager or anyone else in the team harassing you?

If not, then your anxiety might come from an expectation that you must love every part of your job. Use something like pomodoro (this is simple and works: https://brainpls.work/) to do one task at a time. Once your work day is over, go do something you enjoy.

[boredemployee]

>> Is your manager or anyone else in the team harassing you?

No that's not the problem.

I suffer a lot with context switching all the time, I'm responsible for many serious things that could lead the startup to a completely failure.

I'm really not sure if I have the skills for the task/challenge, etc. People like me and my job, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the skills for so much just yet, I think that is the source of all the anxiety. Plus doing/feeling it 8h/day every day kills my mind.

[tarruda]

> I suffer a lot with context switching all the time, I'm responsible for many serious things that could lead the startup to a completely failure.

I believe I'm in a similar situation. Currently on a small startup where I do backend/frontend programming in Typescript, C, Golang and Lua across multiple different projects. I'm high on ADHD and context switching is very difficult to me, to the point where if I start a day working on a project and finish it early, I end up not switching contexts until the next day.

> I'm really not sure if I have the skills for the task/challenge, etc. People like me and my job, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the skills for so much just yet, I think that is the source of all the anxiety.

This seems a bit like imposter syndrome. When I was younger (38 now, almost 20 years working as a programmer) it bothered me when I was not working hard and I felt the need to always show myself being very productive. In time you will learn to care less about how you are perceived at work.

> Plus doing/feeling it 8h/day every day kills my mind.

Do you really code 8h/day? If so you seriously need to lower your pace as this is not sustainable. Pick one or two cognitive heavy tasks you can complete in a couple of hours and once done do light things such as answering questions on slack, writing documentation. Also take healthy pauses to read HN and other articles you find interesting (this is what I'm doing now).

Overall, try to view your job as a marathon and not as a sprint. It is fine to work hard when on a tight deadline, as long as it is the exception.

Here are other very good answers in this HN thread:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35793026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35793147

[yamtaddle]

> I suffer a lot with context switching all the time, I'm responsible for many serious things that could lead the startup to a completely failure.

See if you can get some juniors to take on some of this. Agitate for some hiring, if you need to.

Delegating is how you move up the org chart. Which seems super-weird, like how you can just pay someone some money and then you own what they did—like, what? How does that work? Feels dirty and wrong. But, in fact, it's how everything works above the lower tiers of an organization, and at the top you really are just paying people money and then owning everything they did while you were paying them (then your job is to get someone else to pay you for that stuff—or, uh, to tell some other people to do that part for you, too).

However much it doesn't feel like it, telling others to do work isn't just work (well, "work") it's more prestigious work than actually doing stuff. A career-advancing response to having too much to pay attention to can be, I shit you not, finding other people to do it instead.

[vldx]

OTOH, this is how you grow. Every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. If you haven't yet, the following book by Gerry Weinberg may resonate with you, as it has lots of insight in this context -- "Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach".

> "It identifies which leadership skills are most effective in a technical environment and why technical people have characteristic trouble in making the transition to a leadership role. For anyone who is a leader, hopes to be one, or would like to avoid being one."