Have you ever had one of those days when your entire day’s work was wasted? That’s just what happened to me today. This is not so bad in and of itself. However, I’m under a great deal of pressure from the boss right now (I actually prompted myself to work the entire past weekend after my weekly one-on-one with him!) What’s worse, I misrepresented my work to others and just today found out that my stated progress was way over-exaggerated. Anyways, I feel like I’m in a pressure cooker to make up for my lost time. I would love to get my work to a point where I can truly state I’ve made the progress I had previously stated. So, I started thinking of ways that I can quickly recover so that I can start afresh. Here is my list for what to do after a minor setback at work:
- Have a glass of wine. Ha ha, I’m not kidding. First thing I did when I got home was pour myself some Cabernet.
- Complain. To the husband that I had a bad day, and demand a hug.
- Eat a healthy meal. I realize this is not always going to happen. It was just fortuitous that I came home to a wonderful wild King Salmon meal from my husband. I suppose some hot soup would have done the trick as well.
- Take a hot shower. Now that I’ve cleaned off the day’s grime, I can think afresh.
- Acknowledge the good that came out of my day. For instance, even though I made 0% progress to my end goal, I did end up learning a few things that will eventually get me there.
- Prepare myself to ask for help. My weakness is asking not asking for enough help, so I’ve steeled myself to be humble and actually ask for some. Tomorrow, I’m going to ask a junior engineer to help me with one of the line items I learned about in bullet above #5. I’m also going to ask the resident expert for some advice.
- Lay my worries to bed. Write down my learnings and my To Do’s and then forget about it.
- Do something relaxing like reading or writing. Writing this blog post, for instance, has helped me!
