work won't be better in two weeks.

Stop looking toward the distance and start looking around.

The dishes are piling in your sink. Clothes are littered across your bedroom floor. Your desk has collected more clutter through the week—post-its, bills, scribbles on paper, a smeared whiteboard, your favorite mug with a coffee stained rim. You’re on a call with a coworker; the first few minutes are reserved for small talk. There’s a mutual exchange of jabs at the company’s rapid growth and the mountains of work that followed, but growth is good (especially in this economy). The end of the quarter is close (there’s still so much to do) and next quarter’s roadmap is ambitious but exciting (we learned so much from this quarter, after all). For a moment, there’s a lull in the conversation as your mind flips through the seemingly endless rolodex of unfinished to-do’s sitting in front of you. And the work waiting beyond it. You’re tired.

“But in two weeks, things should lighten up.”

Two weeks go by. Your deliverables had follow-ups or opened a door to more questions. Some deadlines were pushed back, but ad-hoc tasks quickly filled their place. The backlog is growing, and there’s more to plan. What you presumed was the occasional late night slowly became a feature of your evening schedule. Maybe, once you hire a few more people, the workload will lighten.

It isn’t so bad. You can spend your Friday nights alone—cleaning your cluttered desk, folding your scattered and now wrinkled clothes, and finally washing the overflow of dishes piled in the sink. On Saturdays, you might see your friends—they’re concerned you’re working too much, you reassure them it’s only temporary; Finance just approved your headcount requests. And Sundays, ok sure, you do some work but it’s to mentally prepare you for a promisingly productive week ahead. After all, if you put in the work on Sunday, then the ensuing week’s workload will lighten.

Suddenly, it’s autumn. Where did the time go?

a single green light, minute and far away

I might be projecting here. Maybe everyone has a healthy 9 to 5pm with hobbies, time to see the new art exhibit across town, energy to try a new recipe they saw on YouTube,¹ and emotional bandwidth to routinely catch-up with friends and family. But, I have a feeling a good amount of you don’t (hey, we’re in this together) and you’re either living for The Grind or you’re like me and catch yourself making excuses that work is exciting and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. And the distance between you and that green light is only two weeks.

But, how does this happen?

I don’t believe the reason is binary nor do I think it’s exclusive to just work. This is about thresholds, about boundaries, and not knowing when to put yourself first. My hypothesis is that this habit applies to both work and personal. For example:

• Work: Your role is gradually changing and you’re slowly accumulating responsibilities that inch towards pushing your comfort-level. You’re balancing your previous and new responsibilities while still performing at the level your managers expect. Or, there was a sudden fire drill or large project deliverable, and this descends into acclimating to high-cortisol stress-levels where even a notch down feels better than that period of stress.

• Personal: You have a friend or, perhaps, a significant other. This is a tenured relationship with core memories and experiences that span over multiple years. Part of the human condition and experience is change—either yourself, this person, or both—and you’re beginning to see cracks in the relationship. You shrug it off as a phase in their life or yours; after all, you’ve known each other for so many years. These are small discomforts, but hardly “dealbreakers”. Or maybe there’s a fight that is almost unrecoverable. After several months of iterating on solutions to what catalyzed the conflict and using the tenure of the relationship as a crutch, you try to identify other variables in the distance to be the panacea to this discomfort.

While I can separate my profession from my identity and learned to live in the present by chasing feelings, I struggle with boundaries when engaging work consumes my evenings. I love what I do. I care about and respect the people I work for and with. If I told my coworkers and team, “Hey I’m going to stop doing all of these things and you’re going to do it all instead” I probably could and they would most likely understand, but I choose not to. Not only because that’s objectively a bad stance,² but because I enjoy the work and quite frankly I have nothing else better to do on a weekday evening. 

Hm. Why is that?

the plight of the people pleasers

Many have asked why I love what I do if I’m not attached to a long-term career in tech. Arguably, working in data is mainly centered around helping your coworkers succeed in their roles³ and I love that; it's my motivation to constantly rethink and improve how we build our infrastructure and report on the metrics they care about. When I hear a dashboard or interfacing with our data products has allowed someone to become better at their job or they’re more productive in their day-to-day, it’s like a hit of dopamine. And as a manager, a core part of my role is to lift up my team and ensure they’re engaged, proud of the work they’re doing, and happy to log onto their laptops.⁴ But when you’re motivated by other peoples’ happiness, it’s easy to lose track of your own.

This has come at the cost of pushing my thresholds and struggling to set boundaries between myself and my work, despite knowing that I can and should. Mix those with a learned behavior of “overachieving” since the beginning of my academic career and caring too much about producing Good Work™, then the outcome…isn’t great. So while I can say that I’m not attached to this industry, I’m still caught up in the day-to-day. I sleep less than I should, I don’t eat meals consistently, and my neglected friends and family occasionally call to see if I’m still alive and well.⁵ I’ve built a habit of welcoming these late nights in hopes that the work I put upfront now will mean happier coworkers, and an easier “two weeks from now”. But just because something feels fine in the moment, doesn’t mean it should be.

A few weeks ago, I caught up with Anna, my director and an incredible manager. I offhandedly mentioned how I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to think about dating. She smiled knowingly, as she does, and asked: “Do you think you’re filling the gaps in your life with work? It sounds like you’re placing work at the center rather than your personal life.”

For once, I had nothing to say besides a sheepish, “Perhaps.”⁶

But I'm not the only one. I see this in my team, coworkers, peers, and friends. They’re kind and empathetic while also some of the brightest and most creatively ambitious people I know. It’s easy for us to say “yes” or “Let me take this off your plate” or “Evenings are when I’m most productive and excited to do this work!” But if we become caught up in work and allow it to spill into our evenings because we “have nothing else better to do anyway” then it becomes a fixture in our routines. And when we build these habits, then weekday evening plans or “emotional availability” become foreign concepts we’ve learned to live without. 

look around, not toward

We shouldn’t look to the distance to measure when work, or a tenuous relationship, will be better. Defaulting to “it’ll be better in two weeks” is snake oil to the greater problem that is actually surrounding us. Rather than hoping that the future will somehow hold the answer to solving your poor sleeping schedule, contentious working habits, or strained relationship, it’s more productive to look at the reasons why “better” can’t be today or tomorrow.

I’ve been sitting on this for a few weeks now, as I ironically write this well-into my Friday evening. Realistically, this can’t be done in a week. But you can build habits that will gradually work into an actually better two-weeks-from-now which, in my naïve optimism, will remain better. That is, if you’re we’re willing to stop placing your our work and other people’s happiness at the center, and begin centering what you we want and what you we need.⁷

As I mentioned, dear reader, we’re in this together. This is now a support group and the first step is acceptance. Although I’m still guilty of working well into the night, I’ve made incremental changes and, maybe, if I share this with you, we can hold each other accountable.⁸

professionally

Set expectations upfront: I created a spreadsheet for myself and my team (see example here) which calculates how many active working hours we have per week (*a rough average) if we were to subtract standing meetings, an hour for lunch, and an hour to go on a walk/go to the bathroom/stare at the wall. This exercise is for both stakeholders and the team. The existence of this spreadsheet sets a mental model and constant reminder of what we can realistically get done per quarter and that our active working hours are fewer than we think. Think of this as a framework for setting healthy boundaries and transparent expectations at work.⁹

Responsibilities of my role: Lest you forgot, I’m a recovering people-pleaser and so I’m awful at delegating tasks. As a follow-up to quantifying my active working hours, I started listing all of the tasks and responsibilities on my plate. For two weeks, I had a running note of how I spent my time (e.g. noting tickets and seemingly minute, untracked tasks such as hiring follow-ups). The list was overwhelmingly long. I showed my team, I was transparent about my thoughts, and where I needed to focus my time. We discussed solutions, including a support rotation and some taking on those responsibilities to grow their careers. Every time I begin feeling overwhelmed with work, I repeat this practice.

Make weekday plans: Sign up for a class, grab dinner with a friend, take lessons.¹⁰ Having a time commitment in the evening, at least once a week, forces you to close your laptop and sets a habit of acknowledging what you can and cannot commit to at work. When a friend visited me for two weeks, I forced myself to log off everyday at 6pm. In the end, I was surprised to see there were zero consequences if I didn’t work through the night.¹¹

personally

Be selfish (but be transparent about it): It is okay to put yourself at the center. If you shrink your needs to make space for others, then you won’t be able to serve yourself and thus your friends or family when they may need it most. Even after working into the evenings, not sleeping nearly enough, and my apartment in absolute shambles, I would feel immense guilt for not making time for friends. I began overstretching myself. For three months, I filled every weekend to see near or distant friends. In the end, I was emotionally exhausted and my headspace (and physical space) didn’t feel great. Now, I’m more realistic about my emotional capacity and I transparently communicate this to my friends and family. I stopped promising to go to every outing and I started feeling okay with spending more time alone without feeling guilty. You live in your head everyday; no one else does. Only you can advocate for how you’re experiencing your emotions.

what do you want?

Pause for a moment, if you can.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. 

Now, tell me. 

If you were to remove everyone’s expectations (your work, your relationships - familial, platonic, romantic) and focus on how you want to spend your time, what would it look like? What do you want to place at the center that would feel most fulfilling? And what’s preventing you from doing that at this moment? 

If you begin prioritizing those ideals and intentionally work towards placing them at the center, then what can fit around will fit around. But, speaking as a recovering people-pleaser, the responsibility to see that vision come to fruition and to communicate it transparently and guiltlessly is yours and yours alone. I believe that is the hardest part—the fear of disappointing or placing burden on the people you care about because you’re placing your needs first. But, we shouldn’t feel guilty for wanting to pursue our happiness and, perhaps, our self-actualization. Or else we’ll always prioritize our work and everyone else’s needs first, and our happiness will always be just two weeks away.

1. Or you consistently eat three meals a day and none of them involve a slice of cake. What are you? A functioning adult?

2. Unless you want a quick path to team turnover and making enemies with coworkers.

3. The best data practitioners I’ve met share this quality (among many other positives): genuine empathy. It is difficult to be a good data practitioner if you cannot empathize with your stakeholders to understand why they’re trying to answer this question and how they’d interpret/use the deliverable.

4. IMO being a good manager shouldn’t only be measured by the impact of your team, but also if your team is happy and feeling like they’re growing in their roles. Happy team = motivated to produce good work = happy CEO.

5. I wish I was joking, but I frequently receive calls or texts from various friends and family who are “just checking in” because when work picks up, I admittedly become a negligent daughter, sister, and friend.

6. 🥺 👉👈

7. At this point, it’s unclear if I’m writing this for an audience or to myself as a call for help. But, in case you forgot, that’s what this Substack is all about, folks.

8. This is the equivalent of two friends going to the gym together. If one person bails, they look bad. If neither of us show up, well, at least we can be perpetually tired and emotionally unavailable together.

9. Especially for my fellow non-confrontational folks. “You know I would love to do that, but the numbers here say otherwise :\”

10. May I suggest the erhu or the guzheng?

11. Rather than staring at my screen until 9pm, I saw the sun setting over the Pacific ocean almost everyday. This pained me to realize all of the little moments of joy I’ve missed since moving Los Angeles in January.