Calm and Steady - The Joy and Overload of Starting Something New

I've been postponing this blog post for a while. Once again, I'm finding myself in the situation that I literally have to push myself to sit down and start writing with the intent to publish something in the end. To show up and let whatever comes out of it be good enough.

Interestingly, as I've picked up journaling for this year's personal challenge of #CalmAndSteady, there's nothing holding me back from taking note of what's going on in my head day by day. Yet blogging... is a bigger step after all that takes a lot more time. Even though I'm doing this for myself and my own learning in the first place. Well, I've just learned again the last month that my ramblings, musings and public reflections seem to have helped someone in my circle. I'm always super glad to hear this, it's the best bonus I could imagine! My posts definitely aren't for everyone, yet if they help anyone move a step forward on their own journey, what more could I want? 

Alright, let's get to it and look at my last month. So many things happened! It's been really good, and really overwhelming at the same time. While rationally knowing there's only so much I can do given the time and energy left to me, I still had a hard time giving myself grace. I'm still learning to keep my calm, and that steady can also mean a tiny fraction of a small step a day as long as there's movement.

 

New Job, New Role

First the obvious: I've started out at a new company, as a security engineer on their cloud security team, focusing mainly on product security. So many uncertainties and at the same time opportunities come with this! I'm super glad I took this leap, it's already been very rewarding. My new team is awesome: folks are lovely, really knowledgeable, and actively helping each other grow. The domain and product are very interesting and challenging, offering an intriguing mix of valuable legacy and modern innovation. There's plenty of opportunity to have positive impact and really grow there as well. I even have the pleasure (and pain) to dive into yet again a partially new tech stack! Granted, I really do enjoy figuring things out and comparing mental models with what I've worked with before, so that can be counted as a plus.

A new job comes with different constraints and freedoms to adapt to. Based on that, I had to shift my daily rhythm once again, which always takes time adjusting to. Also, adapting to being on-site at the office at times, which comes with all downsides and also benefits. I really forgot how much time is lost just crossing distances, though! Plus dealing with noises, too low room temperature, and so on. And yet it's lovely to see my teammates and other colleagues in person and enjoying lunch together, I really missed that. I'm glad I have a basic grasp of this company's and team's rhythm by now so I can also organize my community endeavors around it without too much of a hassle.

Learning something new can really have a toll on you. I've totally underestimated how much it would on me, it didn't feel like it while going through it. The onboarding was and still is great, the pace feels very sustainable, I enjoy learning lots of things and exploring more every day. And yet. It seems time is just running away from me. I lack energy. Especially in addition with a changed daily rhythm, changed nutrition, changed physical routine, changed room temperature, and so on - rationally, I know it's a lot of change to digest. And yet what I achieve every day next to work feels so little. Guess what, here's the giving myself grace part once more.

Best things: I was neither doubted nor frowned upon by any colleague of any role so far, not even once. Never had that before when joining a new company and team, let alone when taking on a new role! It's just beautiful to see how it can be. On top of that, I was appreciated for speaking at conferences, people highlighted it as a good thing and actively made it possible, just as agreed when taking up the offer. What a relief! And finally, I managed to already contribute hands-on - which I love, as I'm learning so much more when getting my hands on something. This also allows me to figure more things out and ask further questions I wouldn't have known to ask otherwise. The first feedback I've received based on my contributions was very promising and validating, what a relief for my anxious mind! So, after only one month, I'm rather confident already that I really do have a place in this company, team and role, that I can actually grow with them and I will have the space to do so. The last time I had this feeling so quickly was when I started out at Flixbus, where I also took quite a leap and it paid off big time.

By the way, just being on this new role, I already gained new ideas for blog posts and talks. Nothing I've followed up on yet, but more opportunities to spend time sharing more than my personal reflections will come again.

 

Everything, All at Once

Let me repeat: the last month had been quite overwhelming, and also rewarding. All at the same time. In hindsight, there seems to have been a number of coincidences all happening in the same month - February might not have been the smartest month to start my new job just because of everything else happening at this time. It's also been the month when people who made up their resolutions in January started reaching out to collaborate on new endeavors. It's been a month where folks in my circles were looking for a new job and asked for support. I've given my first mock interview this way and it seemed to have helped prepare the other person for their real interview! Definitely a big win. It's been a month when several conferences, podcasts and other events invited speakers or ran calls for papers, which kept me busy. It's also been the month when we fully picked up organizing our own conference again, the Open Security Conference, onboarding lots of new folks to the team (yay!). It's been a month when several private appointments with family and friends took place. It's still been volleyball season with games to be played. And of course, thanks to my changed situation, folks reached out to inquire about my new job, to pick up usual catch-up calls, and also continue shared endeavors.

Well, all this happened within just a few weeks while I was trying to settle at my new company, figure out whether my vacation plans would still work out and if conferences I planned to submit to would be feasible at all, how my new schedule and rhythm is like so I can plan other endeavors around it. 

Oh, and do I have to mention the state of the world? Global and local just as well. Considering there was a very important election going on in my country and the outcome was exactly what I feared it to be - it's been indeed everything all at once in February. Well, after the election is before the election, and every day counts towards working toward a better future, and there are manifold ways to contribute to it.

Looking back, it's no wonder I felt slightly (haha) overwhelmed and lacking energy. The month of March will stay quite busy as well, yet better as a few things could have been clarified already. Afterwards, I plan to keep space for myself to just enjoy the ride and not add much of anything else to my list this year. Instead, I hope to rather reduce things where I can and introduce more slack in my private time. Let's see how long I can keep this up.

 

Calm and steady enough? 

Depending on how you look at it, my personal challenge for the year is either going super slowly and by far not as steady as I wished for; or alternatively, it's going super well as I've been continuously tested to stay calm and confident throughout the month while not feeling at my best capacity or basically having time for anything. Rationally, I realize I did spend lots of time on lots of things, just different ones than I set out to do.

This month, I didn't pick up any new topics. Despite not having much time, I did make some progress on the following ones.

• Continue reading "Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn From Star Wars" by Adam Shostack. I'm really slow in reading. And yet this book is still worth it, showcasing different ways how threats can manifest.
• Adding to my flashcards here and there as I came across concepts to take note of. Didn't practice on them, yet extended them as I go and that was good enough for me this month.
• Finally founded a small CTF team! It's actually happening, we just had our kickoff call and our first CTF participation is already scheduled. Literally can't wait for learning together on this.
• A bit of Hack the Box challenges for myself. Not much, and yet I'm always learning so much when working on them. Even when having to look up things in walkthroughs, the eureka moments are strong here.
• A few C# exercises on Exercism. As I started at my new company and am learning a lot about C# and .NET framework there, I decided not to pursue these exercises further in my free time as of now. Coding exercises are sometimes nice to have, you can limit your thinking to a certain space and can just do a small thing. That being said, I tend to learn more on something that contributes value to a higher goal besides merely finishing an exercise. (I do notice I don't apply the same logic to the Hack the Box challenges, curiously.)
• I completed the other Semgrep Academy courses I wanted to do. So that one's now ticked off my list! Feels good to finish something.

I've experimented with a few approaches to my challenge, mainly how much energy and time to invest in what, and in what order to prioritize things during my day. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. In the end, only the current day and moment can tell me where my energies are flowing and what I'm currently able to invest. Sometimes I have to build up energy by doing seemingly unrelated, or even potentially wasteful things before I'm up for the actual thing. And that's okay as well. It's about giving myself grace and stay calm. (Yeah, I have to repeat this over and over for myself.)

That applies to my joy topics as well. Turns out, I fail investing in them daily. Not that there's no joy at all, I've integrated enjoyable stuff into my days quite well already (like sipping on luxurious tea, or listening to audiobooks). Yet additional pure joy topics (like playing computer games) need more time, headspace, and energy for me. I've done a lot better investing in these things during the weekend. Weekly "pure joy for myself" topics seem to work for me, while my learning topics can indeed be tiny daily steps to make progress.

My needs had been covered quite well-ish during this month. A bit more sleep, a bit more exercise, a bit more warmth would have been good. The next months to come can offer more of that. Journaling still works out super well for me, I'm gaining lots of benefit without it costing me much time.

I've came across thought-provoking inspiration from community folks this month that felt so relevant to my endeavor that I want to leave these peices here for my future self.

• Alan Page shared a very resonating piece in one of his recent newsletters: “So, I’m reminding myself of something as I sit in my favorite local coffee shop: It’s okay to write even when it feels hard. It’s ok to write, even if the subject isn’t riveting or compelling. It’s okay to create, even when it comes in fits and starts. It’s okay to show up imperfectly, with half-formed thoughts, as long as we keep showing up.” This really reminded me of working on showing up. Even if I don’t feel like it on that day. When I did show up on bad days it worked super well for me in the past, I know it can work. Yet it's the same thing what’s been holding me back, or rather how I’ve been holding myself back many times, on so many things I set out to do: not showing up for myself. What a profound reminder.
• I came across a post on Mastodon that included this quote: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Of course, context is crucial for such statements. It does present a perfect reminder to myself for my challenge though: Anything done is better than nothing done. Poorly done is better than nothing done.
• Mark Techson shared this piece of gold: “Need to figure out what I have to let go of to make room for what I want 🤝🏾” So much this... I'm not there yet. Yet.
• On a related note, Amy Edmondson asked this amazing reflection question: “How can I let go of the things that are keeping me stuck?” Phew, hitting the nail on the head. 
• Just a few days ago I told someone else to give themselves grace, that time and energy comes in waves, and tides will rise again. Yeah. The actual target audience was me, myself and I.
  

I did gain confidence through working hands-on on actual tasks, and getting feedback through both the personal realization that I've figured things out as well as external validation from other folks appreciating my work. In addition, I did gain confidence and showed up stronger in other areas of life (like volleyball) as well which is such a nice payoff for my personal challenge.

So overall, steady-ish and calm-ish it was the last weeks. And that's okay for some time as well. I've still did some things, some theory and some practice, some solo and some social stuff. I've done plenty of learning at work, naturally. Doesn't count towards my challenge, and still. I've realized a bunch of times that I've actually gained confidence, and that definitely counts for something. The best: my inner critic had been pleasantly calm this whole month, and rightfully so. That's a huge win, considering all the things that happened. And in hindsight I did better at giving myself grace even though it didn't feel like it.

Yes, there's more that I could do for things I want to do. Yes, there's less I could do for things that don't help me forward. Yes, I could say yes less often to make space for myself and better opportunities to come. It's a learning journey after all. And yes, I'm still excited about this specific personal journey in 2025.

Calm and Steady - Off to a Good Start

The blog post to make a new personal challenge public is usually the most exciting to write. The first post afterwards to share progress is usually the most difficult. Once that initial one is out of the way, I often have a better hunch on what I want to share in what way, whether I use a template for structure or not, how refined the post should be, and so on.

That's exactly why I literally just sat down to type whatever comes into my head at that moment in time. And I intended to share it, as rough and raw as I could allow it to be. I did go over it once more, yet kept in mind that there's more value in sharing early than in over-polishing.

The first month of my new "Calm and Steady" personal challenge is coming to an end. Here's what I've done so far, what worked and what didn't, and the insights I gained.

 

Journaling Using a Template for the Win

I knew I would need some way to track what I'm doing so I can look back and decide on potential course corrections. Additionally, I am well aware that I think in writing - so I like to write to think. Putting words down in writing often help me realize things better than any other way. That's why I set out to start journaling not only for work, but also for personal endeavors like this. 

I've made a conscious choice not to get lost in tooling paralysis but pick the first tool that could possibly work. I needed something that allowed me to get started quickly without hassle yet won't block future migrations. For this case, I tried Notion. It never really matched my needs before, yet using it for a month now I can say it was totally worth making this call. Fast, easy, synced, editable everywhere, not too constrained, and I can just export my notes in markdown and move somewhere else whenever I want to.

Next, I created a template for my daily journal page. I've iterated over this a few times now and just adapted it to what I needed. Having a few sections available meant I could focus my time on the actual content and still check boxes I wanted to evaluate later on. I also made a deliberate choice to have only few free text sections and the rest quickly interactive checkboxes and buttons to save time and lower the burden to do this daily. Here are my current template sections:

• Thoughts: anything noteworthy I want to record or reflect on.
  
• Practice or Theory: what small step I took today to make steady progress.
  
• Joy just for the Sake of Joy: whatever I did just for myself, where joy was the self-purpose.
• Needs Covered: which of my daily or less regular needs I've satisfied today.
  
• Voice of My Inner Critic: how calm or loud my inner critic got and why.
  
• Mood of the Day: how I've perceived the day overall.
  
• Sunday Joy Check: whether what I'm doing still brings me joy or I should change anything.
  

Turns out, this worked surprisingly well for me! It's been giving my thoughts both structure and freedom. I have a daily reminder to fill it, and I actually did so every day. Nice.

 

Enough Options, not too Many

Based on initial ideation, I chose to start the following topics which provide a mix of theory and practice, solo and social time.

• Read "Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn From Star Wars" by Adam Shostack. I have a pile of potentially awesome books on my reading list, and I know it takes me long time to go through any of them. This is the book on the top of my pile, so I finally started it. Didn't make much progress yet, but it's been insightful already.
  
• Write my own flashcards with concepts I come across. Doing so, I followed my original idea to cater to my brain's needs. I started an Anki deck to which I added any terms and concepts I encountered during my daily work on topics. It still grows organically. I wondered when to start learning using these cards in a regular manner to memorize the concepts. I tried the mechanism once as a proof of concept which was already helpful. I think I'll continue building the deck a bit further before I introduce a regular routine.
  
• Explore the Exercism C# track. I like the platform's way of introducing language concepts and allowing you to practice in steps, as well as see other folks' solutions and improve yours iteratively. My upcoming role has a focus on the .NET platform with which I haven't had many touch points yet, and I'm curious about concepts and conventions in C#. 
  
• Solve Hack the Box labs. I just love these security puzzles to practice. I'm still a newbie and there's much to learn, so this involves going through frustration until you either have the eureka moment or the humbleness to look things up and learn by following walkthroughs. Yet any little step equips you better for the next, and it's just fun. Also, it's a great one to do socially together and I'm glad I had great company during this month.
  
• Found a CTF team. It's been on my list for 1.5 years, and guess what? It's now happening indeed! I have a small group of folks who are still interested to join me in this experiment. Once I have a hunch on my work schedule rhythm, I'll organize first informal practice sessions and we'll see where it leads us.
  
• Do Semgrep Academy courses. Back when Tanya Janca offered her We Hack Purple courses, I've already enjoyed the AppSec Level Foundation 1 course. Now it was time to complete level 2 and 3 as well. They were validating of what I already know, filling gaps of what I didn't know yet, and they equipped me with tangible advice for real work situations. Hence, I decided to continue with the other free courses offered, like on secure coding.
  

Turns out, the variety of topics helps me go with my energies each day. At the same time, I've also realized I've reached the limit of topics in focus at the same time. I hope to finish some the next month to maintain flexibility to change my way based on new learnings. 

Same applies to my "joy for the sake of joy" bucket. I draw from a good variety of things I love doing as I go, depending on whatever I'm up to at any given day.

Spotting Behavioral Patterns

In the beginning, I've been quite diligent with keeping my joy topics going every day. I did notice how much I limited time for these things, though, or that I usually put them at the end of the day after everything else was done (business before pleasure and such). In the last weeks, I've once again started to neglect them completely, prioritizing everything else. The things I do for this challenge still bring me joy, yet that's a known pattern that I need to be very cautious about and take deliberate action against.

On a positive note, I've been way better in keeping my needs satisfied. Not super great, but way better than last year. Having my needs as part of my journaling template really helps me not to lose sight of them.

I've identified a detractor I didn't expect: social media. It probably sounds like an obvious one to many, yet I've been rather constrained about it most of the times. That being said, the last months my social media time got really out of hand. I'm spread across too many platforms and formats these days, I didn't filter content enough, and I didn't prioritize my time for the most valuable places. I've started experimenting with a few course corrections in order to get back to a sustainable pace and still get the value out of social media without getting drawn in. Healthy boundaries and such.

Once more, I've realized that I need to tackle smaller tasks and quick wins first to free up headspace and gain momentum to manage bigger ones. Not to feel paralyzing overwhelm and staying in a state of anxiousness, but instead taking action to re-gain a state of calmness.

Going Steady, but Keeping Calm?

Looking back, my inner critic was doing quite a great job this month. The inner voices mostly kept calm and rightfully so. Only rarely they flagged something, mostly valid concerns. It's been a good, restful and rather calm month in general, which made it easier. Yet practicing while being in good shape can help prepare a lot for wilder times. 

I've also learned a few things based on the concerns my inner critic alerted me on.

An alert might feel overwhelming at first, loud and noisy. It might seem unhelpful in the moment. I might only learn if it was valid or not in hindsight. And still there might be something important going on, something to learn from. This happened to me during a volleyball game I had this month (yes, the inner critic also applies to other areas in life). I made the decision to take myself out of the game, hoping to give us a winning chance - my critic was loud in that moment in all possible ways. A week later my coach gave me invaluable feedback that my decision had indeed been a good one for the team and how it showed maturity. In hindsight, my critic was letting me do the right thing yet I wouldn't have needed to doubt my decision.

Whenever I just rush do things quickly and get them out of the way, I fall back to automated thinking and approaches I’ve used most times before. Yet those don't work well when I'm confronted with a new domain or challenge I don't solve every day. Which means, rushing when trying to navigate less experienced terrain makes my critic go loud. To find good solutions (that don’t need to take long either), I need to take some time and calm space, really look at the problem at hand, and think about how to approach it. That’s the frame in which I can make use of other knowledge and pieces of the puzzle I already have that aren't automated yet. Therefore, a reminder to myself: use system 2 to think slowly about problems and you have all your tools available to solve them.

Picking up puzzle pieces as I go sometimes feels really slow (hello, critic!). And yet it proved to be an invaluable approach for me during my whole career. This month, I've learned once again that gathering pieces together with others can turn out to become really valuable for them as well. It's worth it and we all get better as we go. I need to stay patient.

In conclusion, all this helps me see my inner critic in another light. I already knew I could learn from it rationally, and now I have further evidence including the emotional experience. That insight alone was already worth starting this whole challenge. I hope to turn it into further calmness. Also, I'm curious how things will play out the next month when I'm starting at a new company, in a new role. Stay tuned!

Agile Testing Days USA 2023 - A Lot to Think About

Last year's Agile Testing Days USA was full of inspiration. This year, this conference and its community once again gave me a lot to think about.

Before the Conference

Arriving early, I had time to do a bit of sightseeing next to finalizing the preparation for my two sessions. I decided to take it slow and preserve my energy while still checking out some places I haven't seen yet.

Another benefit of being there ahead of time is to connect with people already before a conference starts and slowly getting into networking and exchanging experiences. So good to see familiar faces again and re-connect - like with Kelsey Schoen whom I met last year. On the evening before the conference started, we had a lovely dinner group which resulted in great conversations. Many thanks to João Proença, Jenna Charlton, Jenny Bramble, Paul Holland and Erik Davis!

Tutorial Day

A dream came true for me: I finally could meet Elisabeth Hendrickson in person! She's one of my personal heroes in tech. I followed her and her work for a long time via social media and was eager to learn from her in person. So when I realized she'll be at this conference and also give a tutorial, I didn't hesitate once to sign up for it. Especially as it perfectly fit my situation: "Doing the Hard Stuff".

This tutorial was indeed worth it already. It was awesome. I had hoped to get insights and advice for current difficult leadership situations as well as guiding principles for those still to come and I was not disappointed. Elisabeth shared a toolkit of the wisdom she collected over years working with teams and organizations - a toolkit full of wealth of applicable wisdom. Super interesting on a meta level as well, as I am sharing some of my own tactics in my latest talk.

We had a small group with high safety where we could bring our current challenges, think openly together about them using the toolkit, and discuss options to move forward. The self-organized structure of the tutorial made me think of an all-day themed lean coffee session with lots of dedicated time for each topic - wonderful to get detailed thoughts and feedback from everyone, and also be able to contribute! One of my topics got discussed into detail as well and I received lots of input and ideas what to try next - along with validation of my own stance and connecting the dots on what I already knew. Invaluable.

At some point, I really wondered about my own confirmation bias - as I kept nodding throughout. I really related to the toolkit topics shared. Was it because I learned and adapted a lot from Elisabeth and her peers already over the years, or were they really reflected in my own experience? Well, probably a bit of both. Anyways, it was amazing to see lots of the ideas and approaches I had used in my past being validated and built on by a group of peers.

There's a lot to ponder about and make use of. I'm really grateful for having had the chance to participate, I took a lot with me. I bet more people would benefit from this content, it actually would make a great book.

Every technical problem is, at its core, a people problem. With her tutorial, @testobsessed is giving us insights on how to do the Hard Stuff 🦄#AgileTDUSA2023 pic.twitter.com/UDd58u6mpt

— AgileTD Zone (@AgileTDZone) May 22, 2023

Right after the tutorial, it was time to get together with everyone and mingle for a "Meet the Speakers" event. This meant new people to get to know and connect with! A curious side note was when one person mentioned that they thought speakers would get formally introduced, and then being pleasantly surprised they're already among the crowd - being just normal humans as everyone else.

Finally, it was time for speakers dinner. My opportunity to connect with Allison Lazarz and catch up with Larissa Rosochansky and Rafael Cintra!

Conference Day 1

The first full day of talks and workshops for everyone was full of interesting sessions. Here are the ones that I joined.

• Early Morning Lean Coffee with Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin. I make it a point to go to at least one lean coffee session per conference whenever offered. Whoever shows up are the right people and whatever topic is discussed, I gain insight from it! If I'm lucky, my own topics are selected and people's thinking help me move forward with a challenge. Like this time - I'm grateful for the input received. Many thanks to Janet and Lisa for facilitating these sessions and for doing it so welcomingly!

  Lean Coffee underway at #AgileTDUSA! 🦄🎉 pic.twitter.com/V475QxZUQ7

  — lisacrispin @lisacrispin@mastodon.social (@lisacrispin) May 23, 2023

• Keynote "Imperfect Agile" by Jenna Charlton. What a great opening keynote reminding all of us to remember self-care and keep our own boundaries, while also encouraging to resolve conflict in a timely manner and find closure instead of piling onto existing grudges - and emphasizing that impact is more important than intent. All that while following the story of figuring out what agile actually means. Just loved the conclusion of "Take what works, leave what doesn't, don't do harm - it works for us is enough"!
  
• Keynote "Bigger than the Box" by Erika Chestnut. Great keynote emphasizing that testing is not all the work even though people try to keep us in the box. Loved that Erika showed ways how we can claim the power in what we do, seize the opportunities around us and let quality shine in a new light together with everyone. Very important messages.
  
• "Stop Making QA The Last Train Stop Before Production" by Rick Clymer. Really related to this talk and think more people need to hear it. I witnessed so many folks being stuck in what they do. This talk showed very concrete and actionable things they could do to get out of their situation and not only provide more value yet also get more value out of their work themselves.
  
• "Business Agility Lab" by Ray Arell, Rhea Stadick, Tobey Aumann and Shawna Cullinan. This was a positive surprise! I didn't expect much and came to the session as a mere filler. And received a nice hands-on introduction to Wardley mapping, a topic I would have chosen if it had been offered in the program! Loved the examples Tobey provided and the opportunity to try it ourselves. Wasn't too easy to get started with, yet understanding grew the more we tried it.
• Keynote "Focus. Deliver. Learn. Repeat." by Elisabeth Hendrickson. What an amazing keynote. Just kept nodding throughout, so many excellent points made! Sadly, this could have been given twenty years ago already, and maybe was. Why haven't we learned this in the meantime? Overall, this was a dearly needed reminder to focus back on XP principles, including the reasoning why. Delivered in a wonderful energetic and authentic way.
  

My own session on this day was my workshop "Grow Your Technical Confidence". I had a small but great group, learning together. It's always fascinating to see people dare to try something new and potentially scary, and then have them figure out what they already know about it and that they can already contribute - hence increasing their confidence for the next step once again.

Shift your perception and focus on learning - enjoy your journey of becoming technically confident with @lisihocke workshop 🦄#AgileTDUSA pic.twitter.com/YdRoJtnsPO

— AgileTD Zone (@AgileTDZone) May 23, 2023

To conclude the day, organizers invited everyone to an Oktoberfest party! Loved the conversations with Melissa Eaden, it's such a pleasure to reconnect with folks I haven't met for a while. More exchange followed with Ray Arell, Tobey Aumann, Pete Walen, Tara Walton and others before the evening came to an end.

Conference Day 2

The last day of the conference provided further insights and even more to ponder about. Here are the sessions I listened to.

• Keynote "Where is testing heading?" by Paul Holland. This keynote provided a reminder on bad trends in testing, historically and current, along with their reasoning. So what can testers do nowadays? Paul recommended to focus on what automation cannot do well, and make use of the tools at hand.
  
• "The dark side of agile implementation" by Lisette Zounon. Just loved the focus on how culture is essential whether people can thrive or literally end up in the emergency room. The audience interaction to openly think about warning signs and anti-patterns was a nice addition. It was quite sad to see how many folks seemed to have endured rather toxic cultures. Yet what makes us succeed is team happiness! Loved the emphasis on taking care of ourselves and practicing self-care - dearly needed that reminder.
  
• "Mobile app testing sucks. Here's how to do it better." by Eden Full Goh. This talk provided lots of insights on what we're usually missing when testing mobile apps. Loved all the examples of new features, device configuration settings, and more things that are too often not considered - especially when it comes to automation. Very tangible and practical advice and new ideas how to test better on mobile, both on exploring more and finding new ways to automate user interactions.
  
• "The WHY you are!" by Dr. Rochelle Carr. What an amazing keynote in content and delivery. Loved Dr. Rochelle Carr's abundant energy on stage and refined skills to truly engage the audience with the content shared! The messages themselves - they hit home. More than I expected to, this keynote gave me lots to think about my own why and purpose, what drives me - and how it changed over time. Very impactful.
  
• "How we're setting up QE's to fail" by Vernon Richards. This talk opened my eyes that should have already been open. I knew about glue work, and I knew about quiet quitting. Yet Vernon made the connection to where testers often find themselves, and that all of our work is indeed technical leadership - whew, that blew my mind. I think I heard this message before, yet this talk delivered it to me just at the right time to truly understand it. Gave me a lot to think about!
  
• "Building a Culture of Accessible Software" by Jon Hussey. This talk provided a lot of actionable advice on how to increase awareness about accessibility, a topic that is very relevant to me right now. I loved how Jon connected this to his own story, what he tried, what didn't work and what did. His one request was for each and everyone of us to ask for more accessibility - something we all can do. A very important topic we all need to hear more of!
  
• "Feedback Techniques for Transparent Teams" by Dee Ann Bernau. We all need to learn how to receive and give better feedback as it's essential for learning. This talk gave models to help our thinking about feedback as well as tangible steps to take and improve on feedback ourselves. One point caught my eye that I would have loved to hear more about: Creating a system to call out bad behavior in your team. More to think about.
  
• Keynote "The Secret To My Success" by Melissa Eaden. This keynote was amazingly brave. Mel shared her personal story on stage which allowed me to realize how many more people are affected by trauma and systemic issues than we might realize from just seeing the "successful" facade. Really appreciate the reframing of what success means for us and finding our own definition of what to work toward. Loved the emphasis on how giving someone a chance can have a life-changing and even life-saving impact on them, and how especially tech can lift people out of a situation they would not have gotten out otherwise. As well as asking for an outside observer view! One more argument to indeed get coaching, or therapy, or both. I admire Mel for her vulnerability and I hope this talk helps more people on their journey towards more good than bad days. It definitely had impact on me, I have lots to think about.
  

On this day, I gave my brand-new talk "Team Transformation Tactics for Holistic Testing and Quality" for the first time live on stage - in its most condensed short form. According to feedback it seems people got something out of it to take with them, what more can I want?

@lisihocke sharing that while implementing holistic testing for team transformations can take longer than expected, the benefits are worth the journey. #AgileTDUSA pic.twitter.com/eHr5rH8ka3

— Tristan Lombard 🇺🇦 (@TristanLombard2) May 24, 2023

Share access, share knowledge, share pain, share glue work, and share the credit.
- @lisihocke

Step by step tips on team transformation.. amazing 😍#AgileTDUSA pic.twitter.com/NNOmKjqVCn

— Tara (she/her) (@TaraWithTiaras) May 24, 2023

A great bonus this day: Ash Coleman was in town and stopped by to say hi! Such a pleasant surprise, was so good to see her again, even if only for a few minutes.

When you accidentally crash a testing conference and run into all of your friends! 🤩🤩🤩 @AgileTDUSA 🦄 @heather_reiduff @theBConnolly @elmoray @testobsessed pic.twitter.com/ouI6PCGIHo

— Ash Coleman (she/they) (@AshColeman30) May 24, 2023

Right after the conference ended, the social closure began with food, games and even more conversations. I joined a great dinner group with João Proença, Melissa Eaden, Jenna Charlton, Jenny Bramble, Tara Walton, Vernon Richards and Tristan Lombard.

I've been kidnapped for dinner (And dessert)! @lisihocke @melthetechie @TesterFromLeic @jennydoesthings @TristanLombard2 @TheyWrestleTest @jrosaproenca #AgileTDUSA #fieldTrip pic.twitter.com/WvNf7fVhMH

— Tara (she/her) (@TaraWithTiaras) May 25, 2023

Afterwards I ended up in storytelling conversations with Elisabeth Hendrickson, João Proença, Ray Arell and Kirtika Dhathathri. Really loved the chance to talk with Elisabeth once more - I really appreciate her for being so approachable, with people all the time and so authentic - very appreciated and amazing to see.

Post-Conference

After a conference is over means the start of digesting everything. There's overcoming the post-conference blues of having had to say goodbye again to many dear people, there's follow-up to process all the gained insights and notes and everything, and there's rest to catch up with. And some more sightseeing to do to make best use of the efforts of traveling!

Once more I realized how much time and effort the conference follow-up tasks that I do take. This made me think about what I could cut down to make it less burdensome and tedious, and grant more capacity to work on other opportunities. One particular task stood out for me: processing my sketchnotes. Not only do they eat up a lot of energy to take during the talks, I also spend lots of time to take good enough photos of them, then transcribe them to get good enough alt texts for increased accessibility (kudos to Cakelin (Kaitlin) Marquardt for demonstrating how to write alt texts for sketchnotes!), then to create threads with the sessions and alt texts on both Twitter and Mastodon. Phew. Lots of time and energy goes into all that and it's often exhausting to do after a conference when I am tired anyway. I realized that nowadays sketchnotes don't save me time anymore, which was the very reason I started sketchnoting in the first place. So I felt maybe it's time again to for the next experiment to find a more effective way to take and share notes. And guess what? Shortly after considering that, I received abundant positive and grateful feedback on my sketchnotes, including personal messages on how impactful they are and suggestions that I could even make a book out of them. I'm feeling honored! At the same time, I guess I have to really think about how to best move forward from here.

In any case, I was leaving yet another Agile Testing Days USA with a full heart and mind, lots of insights to ponder upon and ideas to try next. Many thanks to organizers and volunteers for creating this space and making this edition run so smooth, and to my fellow speakers and participants for learning so openly together. Now I have a lot to think about.

Consistency

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about consistency, mainly encouraged by two things. First, I've listened to the Dare to Lead podcast episodes in which Brené Brown speaks with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. Consistency and intensity played a big role in the conversation.

Most people need consistency more than they need intensity.

Intensity:
-run a marathon
-write a book in 30 days
-silent meditation retreat

Consistency:
-don't miss a workout for 2 years
-write every week
-daily silence

Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress.

— James Clear (@JamesClear) June 15, 2019

Second, I've had some beautifully inspiring conversations with my colleague Vernon Richards on how consistency can be key to a lot of things. One showcase example was his amazing series of "Ship 30 by 30" essays that had him write and publish posts each and every day. Check them out if you haven't already, they're truly insightful.

Post 31!

The one about the last 30 days! pic.twitter.com/pbr1hnsJAu

— Vernon Richards | Quality Coach (@TesterFromLeic) February 7, 2022

Overall, I can contribute lots of my own achievements to consistency. Not only my achievements, also my well-being - yet the same is true for the opposite as well. Be aware that this is just me speaking from my bubble here, things might look completely different in your context. Yet here's what's going on in my head about consistency.

Make Consistency Your Friend

Looking back, much of my success is rooted in consistently showing up and taking action. I've never been the best at what I do, yet whenever I did useful things consistently it paid off well for me. At work, this mostly shows when taking responsibility and also acting on my commitments. This can both create a perception of reliability, as I'm not only promising but also let action follow, as well as make me very visible - I'm showing myself through my contributions.

Another example would be trying consistently to improve things. It might be a tiny thing, yet if one tiny improvement is made every day, they add up. Make sure to check out GeePaw Hill and his approach of Many More Much Smaller Steps! Also, consistently delivering something good enough is a lot better than never delivering at all (and also never receiving feedback). This was a hard lesson to learn for me, yet allowed me to let go some of my unhelpful perfectionism - and the past years have proven over and over again that this is definitely the better way to go for me.

For my professional growth, consistency helped me a lot as well with my personal experimentation, my contributions to the community in various ways, even with just making time to learn and grow myself. Through consistently honing a skill - who would have thought - you gain lots of practice! Which again makes the next steps a bit easier. Also, I've built related habits for myself many years ago - tiny things I do every day that still help me achieve a lot. Not all of the things I tried worked out and became actual habits, yet once I figured what did work, I could keep them up for many years. And they paid off.

Looking into other areas of my life, consistency helped me a lot there as well. For example, doing a bit in the household every day does wonders for keeping things more under control than doing it sporadically in bursts. Or back in the day when I agreed to become a volleyball coach. I sticked to it over a longer period, and hence draw a lot of lessons for life and personal growth out of it. When consistently exercising, it's not as hard to do it anymore. When I stick to my sleep rhythm consistently, I'm feeling a lot better. Self-care in general! Since my last personal challenges, I made it a point to make time for certain activities that I only do for my own joy and pleasure - every week. Friends noticed I don't make much progress with these activities - yet the thing is, this way I do make progress at all while otherwise I would miss out completely.

As a side note, I do value consistency in general. I notice that when reviewing things, consistency (respectively its non-existence) is one of the aspects that usually sticks out to me, whether it was in focus of the review or not. When products are mostly consistent, I perceive them as more well-rounded than if they would not be. If texts use and spell terms consistently, they flow better and I don't stumble when reading.

On the other hand, whenever I let go of consistency that helped me (e.g. by dropping activities or postponing tasks), things quickly get overwhelming and I feel I'm losing my grasp. I observe this for example with all my private messages and notifications - if this pile grows too big, I feel its crushing weight. The more it grows, the less I want to face it and hence keep it growing. If instead I make sure to respond to some each day, it stays manageable. Also, when letting go of consistency, it gets so much harder to start again - like exercising, or just writing this blog post. I haven't been as consistent with blogging the last years as I had been before. Sustainable pace can really do wonders. That being said, I don't think we should keep up doing things just because we've always did them. We need to think about purpose, what's helpful and what not.

One of the worst things for me personally happened when I stopped showing up as I used to. I faced this with volleyball the hard way. I've put a lot into this sport for so many years and also had quite some personal achievements there. Yet as soon as I stopped showing up consistently and putting in that effort, I've taken myself out of the game - especially mentally. The more I put myself to the rim, the more I was put there as well by everyone else. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy - one that really hurt, more than I can say. Especially realizing I had a big part in that myself. And it was and still is really hard to pull myself out of there and show up again - consistently.

Be Aware of Impact

So, consistency is great, right? Well, as with everything, this depends a lot on what impact my actions have. If I do something consistently that's harming others or myself, I'd argue consistency works against people. A system, which is designed to maintain itself, might be consistent yet not necessarily be good at all. If I consistently overwork myself, my health will deteriorate. Yet also if I consistently grab a task at work, I'm contributing to creating a silo - this task might not be picked up by anyone else anymore, they might not be able to build up the required knowledge and skill to do it, and I'm stuck with it. Despite being consistent, the impact of our actions might not be desirable.

In my experience, the more consistent our behaviors or habits, the less energy it costs to keep them up. Independent from the impact they might have. Therefore, let's have a look at what we do consistently, which impact this has on us and everyone else, and if this fits to our values and what we want to achieve.

What about changing our behaviors to have different impact then? Isn't consistency contradicting change? While it might sound like it, they can instead even play into each other's hands. Just think of all the continuous improvement approaches and how to make consistent change.

The bottom line for me is that consistency is just an aspect that can work either way. So, let's make good use of consistency and have it work in our favor.

Look for Opportunities

Am I going back to consistently writing blog posts? Well, I don't know yet. I tried last year and it didn't work out then. If anything, we'll find out together. Fortunately, there are many other ways I can make consistency work for myself, every day.

Yet what about you? Think about opportunities where consistency would help you in your life. How might it look like if you started doing things consistently? And what's stopping you from trying it out?

Dear Future Me: I Am Not Alone

Dear future me. I'm writing this while being very tired. I am still spending my time and energy on this deliberately, hoping to remind you of a very stressful time I'm still recovering from: the last six months.

Over the past couple of years, I've started to think a lot more about my energy levels and capacity. Especially when the pandemic became obvious beginning of 2020 and life changed, I felt I needed to cut down on what I do and focus on a few things at a time, working at a sustainable pace. Thinking I had achieved that, I promised myself never to get back into a situation with high stress levels over a long period of time, feeling completely overwhelmed. Little did I know, I did not have everything in hand to prevent what happened since beginning of the year. So here's a reminder to myself and anyone who relates to this situation: if you encounter circumstances again where everything ends up on your desk, be reminded of what happened this time, what consequences it had and which strategies helped to get through it.

So what happened? In short, my work load exploded, I went with it and the energy spent left me depleted.

• Team size exploded. End of last year, my product team consisted of six full-time employees and a working student. With only three full-time developers we were looking for more people to join. Then one of the three decided to leave and the situation became more urgent to solve. As a blessing in disguise, four developers moved internally and one developer came from outside the company to join our team - all within one month. Yay, problem solved, right? Well, this meant we suddenly were eleven full-time employees plus one working student. I guess most people who have worked in cross-functional product teams can understand what that meant. Our communication pathways multiplied with every new person on the team. With me as the dedicated tester on the team still being involved in all stories, the team mostly working in solo mode at that time, and people starting new stories when waiting for feedback, meant that I had at least twelve stories at the same time on my desk. Imagine the context switching effort and waste coming along with that alone. Feedback loops slowed down immensely and our cycle time increased. Everything took long. Working modes that were okay-ish before did not work at all anymore.
• Onboarding effort multiplied. So overall, in January and February five new developers joined nearly at the same time. With me being one of two persons having been the longest in the company, in the team and on the product, plus having a unique holistic view on everything that's involved with developing it, this meant a lot of the onboarding and knowledge sharing effort ended up on my desk. While I really enjoy onboarding new people - and these five were lovely people to join our team - this really took a toll on me. Yet still, we need to set people up for success and give them the knowledge they need to have impact themselves. I simply can't leave my teammates hanging.
• Old conflicts reached the melting point. My team from last year was together for quite a long time and it started to dissolve more and more. We had wonderful times together, and also times we did not manage well. There's a lot to learn from that alone, yet the sad fact is that a long and slowly growing conflict took a toll on each and every one who had been part of that old team constellation. In the end, the two other former developers decided to leave the company for new opportunities as well. All these ups and downs took a lot of emotional energy from everyone of us. It took up a lot of cognitive capacity as well and made any interaction way harder than it had to be.
• Building a new team, remotely. Since beginning of May, we're now finally our new team constellation and starting to shape this team to the one we want to be on, where everyone is welcome, included, safe to speak their mind, encouraged to experiment and collaborate and learn together and everything. Exciting times, yet we need to put in lots of effort. Also, this is the first team for all of us, where nearly everyone on the team only met each other remotely. We need to learn how to grant ourselves social time, get to know each other, evolve our culture, and more - all virtually. We are distributed across four locations, so the remote setup is amazing in leveling the playing field and providing the same access for everyone. I'm curious where this journey leads us, and already very happy to be part of this new team.
• Upskilling people to enable them to take over activities that usually ended up with me. No matter how often I reached a point where testing was indeed a whole team activity, with the former team constellation it ended up again mostly with me. Especially exploratory testing or testing for any kind of other quality aspect than the core functionality. The same with operations and infrastructure tasks, responding to alerts, user support, writing release news, and so on. Scheduling and facilitating meetings. Cross-team communication. All kinds of glue work to keep the balls from falling to the ground. I strongly believe in the whole team approach and creating a base of knowledge for everyone. No need to become the expert in one area, yet we should be able to help each other out, reduce bottlenecks and waiting time, unblock each other, being able to go on sick leave and also vacation without things piling up for us in the meantime or worrying they won't get done. So with new people on board, this task could only be done by me, naturally. Super thankful that my new teammates are very open and supportive and not hesitating to see beyond their own nose. They stepped up and took over responsibility even if things were outside their usual comfort zone.
• Taking up product work and sharing its responsibility in the team. Our product owner had great news: his family got a new member! I really appreciate him going on a long parental leave and also preparing the team for it. He is still working one day per week, yet we all agreed to spread the product responsibility across the team and see that we all carry a bit of the load so it's not too much for anyone. Still, with me being the one longest on the team and product, I ended up as natural contact person for most people outside the team, even though it was communicated differently. So many requests coming in! While I am only seeing a fraction of it, I'm in awe of product owner work. Also, we all in the team are now learning how to tackle user experience in a better fashion, how to spread UX knowledge in the team and how to support our researcher better with his work, and how to fill the gap of other UX roles like design or writing. A lot more to learn on this path!
• Our team's domain got lots of fresh people. Since beginning of the year, a lot more new people joined our domain, including two new persons on the domain leadership level. New people bringing new energy and lots of ideas! Naturally, onboarding needed to be done on domain level as well. Again, as being one of the persons longest in the domain and also having the "Principal" seniority level, sharing a lot of knowledge and experience ended up on my desk without the possibility of delegating this work. Giving feedback to new initiatives, doing my share helping to drive them forward, new sync meetings, participating in domain workshops, and more.
• Seeds planted over the last years in my colleagues' minds finally began to sprout. I really don't know what exactly happened, yet since beginning of the year a lot of people reached out to me. Suddenly they were taking me up on my continuous offers to give workshops or talks, to listen and give advice where wanted, to support their own experiments and initiatives, and more. I love seeing people this energized and acting on their ideas and I'm happy to support. "People first" as a principle does not only apply to my own team, so I didn't turn them down. Yet all these requests added up for me.
• Mentoring, coaching and an accountability partnership. Over the last years, I had about one mentee at a time, sometimes one or two more without the formal relationship. This year I got a new mentee to nudge further on her journey - which is great! Also, this part of the job comes with the seniority as well: growing more senior people. With my mentee from last year we had agreed to continue the relationship as accountability partners - on the topic of saying "no" (imagine). In addition, I took on my very first coachee as an experiment for both our growth as well. Each and every of these relationships have clear boundaries and don't take up much time - yet overall they do add quite a bit. Yet again: people first.
• Co-creating and running a series of six leadership workshops. I'm in a hybrid role as a principal engineer who's embedded on a cross-functional team. This means that I spend part of my capacity on cross-team initiatives to drive change on a different impact level. Over the last years I've found a rough rule that worked nicely for me: one third of my time I spend on everyday work on my team to evolve our product, one third for thinking ahead and driving innovation within said team and product, one third for initiatives outside my team, usually on a global scale. Worked pretty well last year, helping me to focus on less work in progress and also keep a sustainable pace. For this year, the main initiative I chose to do outside my team was to pair facilitate a series of six leadership workshops together with our coach Shiva Krishnan. I had participated in these workshops in the previous year and found their content to be very relevant and valuable to spread further. My experiment was to build quality on yet another level here, setting the base line and culture for good things to emerge. According to my experience, driving specific testing and quality initiatives mostly failed when they clashed with the existing culture. This year, I wanted to work on the mindset part from yet another angle and also build awareness on diversity, equity and inclusion topics as part of these leadership workshops. Well - long story short, Shiva and I ended up reworking each and every one of the six workshops, pulling them to a higher level and building yet a better framework by doing so. The magic of pairing! Any one of us alone would not even have imagined the end result. Together we put in a lot of effort yet also had a way better outcome in the end. I don't regret any moment working on these workshops - even though it was way more work than anticipated, and we had put ourselves up to keep hard absolute dates with each workshop.

  Thank you @lisihocke for partnering with me. If you have never paired with someone to co-create and facilitate a workshop, I would definitely recommend that you try. The journey and the end results are truly amazing!!! https://t.co/haX5MHDsYO

  — Shiva Krishnan (@shiv_krish) May 28, 2021

There might have been more things that I've forgotten to list here. Yet you can already see that there's no way that all of this would ever fit into a 40 hours work week when everything needs to take place at the same time and the goal is to achieve all that in five to six months. Some colleagues reached out with lots of requests, and when I explained my situation they shared they can really relate and things can wait; while giving me yet three more tasks. Sigh. My task list of additional "small things" to work on grew to 40 tasks that all would take at least 15 minutes to 1 hour and I just didn't know when to ever do them, while me being the only person who could work at them. I felt I was set up for failure and adding to that myself. Believe me, on each thing landing on my desk I pushed back way harder than at any time in my career before, challenging every bit of work if it really needed to be done, be done this way, be done by me, be done by me alone, be done by time x, be needing my attendance - and yet way too many things ended up with me anyway. Way too often I was in back to back calls the whole day (with follow-up tasks coming from them of course), while in the meantime I received so many chat messages with way more tasks waiting for me. Yes I can pull through this, and yet it will drain my energy levels completely. Way too often I felt I'm playing a game of "Whac-A-Mole" without being ever able to win - at least not on my own.

The consequences of all this?

• Being the bottleneck. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed being the bottleneck. A long time since I said goodbye to that mindset and never wanted to look back. From time to time I still ended up being the bottleneck (e.g. being the only one knowing how to do a certain thing), yet I usually took this as an indicator to change the situation. Having bottlenecks and knowledge silos is neither resilient for the system nor fun for the individuals. It just increases waiting times, triggers unhelpful behavior (like taking on a new task while waiting) and more. Believe me, I'm totally happy with not being the bottleneck and I'm way better able to contribute then.
• My cognitive load exploded. With all the points above I had to keep way too many things in mind. Way too many context switches. Way too much balancing and juggling. If one thing dropped, way too often it cascaded into other things. Once more I realized what 100% (or more) utilization really means: a catastrophe. So many times I simply could not think anymore; you know, deeply think, really think something through. Staying too superficial just to cope with the situation led me to make less fortunate decisions. I lost focus on what's actually important and what can wait. Trying to make all these switches slowed my thinking to a halt. And yet I tried to pull through instead of taking breaks.
• The more stressed I got, the more I fell back to bad habits. Like solo work, trying to solve everything myself (so it's "faster" and just "done") without pulling others in (so more people could help out in the future). Especially in the first months this was a missed chance. Another bad habit: being unable to say no. I know I'm a people pleaser, a learned behavior from childhood years, so I'm aware I need to work on this. I do have an accountability partnership specifically for that reason, so we can keep each other accountable on keeping an eye on our load. Practicing saying "no" to opportunities, or "not yet". Trying to delegate things, sponsor other people instead of taking on more things that are not in our focus, outside the area where we want to make the biggest impact. End of last year this worked well, yet this year I learned that the higher my stress levels, the lower my boundaries to accept new work load. This is something to keep in close check.
• Getting angry with myself and the example I set. Angry with myself that I let this happen to me (which was not helpful at all but just added another layer of energy spent and capacity used up). Angry with myself that I felt the need to pull through all this and cope with the situation - despite me never wanting to take on as much anymore. The contradiction alone. Also, I was well aware being in a position of leadership, and leading by example taking on that much and not being able to delegate or take breaks, this is setting a really bad example I did not want for our culture. Working late or on weekends? I was always the first one telling my teammates that this is not the way to go (unless where really needed to balance with life), and that it's not good to set this bar for the rest of the team who might start thinking it's expected from them. All this while I was doing exactly that, just trying to hide this from my team. While I am also the one who advocates for transparency! Oh my.
• My body alerted me of the elevated stress levels. I mean, more than usual. I started developing new physical responses to stress to a level that my body actually made me notice - a first timer for me. This was something I could not push away yet really got me thinking. It made me realize I really need to stop this. Get out of this situation as soon as possible.
• Feeling overwhelmed, helpless, anxious. Way too many times I broke into tears or screamed in frustration or wanted to throw something. Anything. All this took up again time and energy that I felt I needed to spend to resolve this work situation and get out of it as soon as I can - while still being aware that this would mean months. Several colleagues and friends repeatedly reached out to me sharing their concerns that I'm stretched too thin and that I really need to get things off my table. Yes, I know. I don't know how though, and I'm sad it shows. I really appreciate you all for reaching out - I still couldn't see any other way out than pulling through.

Of course that's not everything. There's more to life than work.

• We're still living in a pandemic. I learned that I am totally happy with continuous change at work and drive improvements actively, yet especially in private settings I need a constant to hold on to and give structure, like my schedule. Any change in my daily routine takes a long time to establish new automatisms around it - costing lots of energy. The constant change of rules what's allowed and what not in the pandemic really drained me. Rather give me a more restricted set of rules and keep it for longer, I can live with that way better than having it change every few days or weeks.
• Family and friends having a hard time. People were needing me in many different ways. We went through lots of ups and downs. Having to solve a lot of things remotely with people who are not used to work that way is a challenge in itself. Solving problems I never had to solve before while conveying that knowledge at the same time took a lot of energy from my side.
• My personal projects and endeavors came to a full stop. At first I tried to make time for them nonetheless, then I realized I had to stop whatever I could. The last years I took on a lot and I'm aware of that. At the same time, my personal projects served as a sort of boundary for work, any hours outside working hours were simply reserved for other things already which helped me to keep these boundaries. They also gave me a lot of energy and allowed me to learn a lot of different things. Yet they had to go - during the past months I simply didn't know anymore how to ever manage that load otherwise. Slowly, I am now taking up a bit of public speaking again, yet mostly around existing sessions with the least effort possible.
• Crossing my own boundaries for self-care way too many times. I failed to keep up my personal goals to do things only for myself (like games, sports or reading). Feeling guilty here as well and trying not to.
• Way too many private messages and communication. While I heard many people struggling with the reduced connections during the pandemic, I so often wished for a lot less. I am usually receiving around 40 to 50 private emails every day, with around 10 I really need to respond to. Usually I'd be fine with that, I learned to get them out of the way quickly whenever I can. Also I'm happy when people are reaching out! Yet in above situation over the last half year these messages were way too many! Hence, seeing any kind of new email or social media notification immediately made me cringe and increased my stress levels.

If I've ever felt burned out or getting real close to it, it was over the last months. A really scary place to be that I wanted to get out of as soon as possible. So I did work on finding my own way out. Oh yeah, this came on top - yet I felt this would be my saver. I tried a lot of things, yet here are strategies that indeed helped me on the long run in my specific context and situation. They mostly resolve around setting boundaries and spreading the load by enabling people to help out.

• Take breaks. Really, I need to take breaks even if I feel I don't have the time for them. Sometimes just getting away from the table helps, like when making myself a new tea even though I didn't need one yet.
• Take time to reflect and think. Sit down and reflect on what worked in times that resembled the current one, like back when I was working on big teams. The past months I continued reflecting and taking note of my thoughts in a journal. In hindsight this helped me a lot to unload myself of emotions or thoughts as well as to clear up my thinking. I had discovered over the last years that writing helps my thinking, so journaling is a great way for me to get my thoughts straight. If you wonder, I mostly just take bullet points, as little as needed, and sometimes thoughts are just flowing and filling up the white space.
• Reduce the load in progress. Making principles like "stop starting, start finishing" very explicit again so people start looking around if they could help out someone else before starting something new, or just not start something new not to increase our work in progress even further. Cut down what you're working on, and then cut down even more.
• Remember you are not alone. As shared, I'm a people pleaser and this often drives my behavior. I am using an "allower message" as antidote, so whenever I perceive being a failure (meaning I cannot please all people), I remind myself of a specific message to ground myself again. "Please yourself first" worked well for me last year. This year I changed it to "I am not alone". This reframing allowed me to break out of my solo overwork behavior (that helped no one), reach out to others earlier, and accepting their help better.
• Refrain from solo work. My current team is not yet familiar with ensembling, yet open for pairing. So I paired a LOT. To the point where I committed to testing only together with other people - if we didn't find time together, well this thing did not get done. Giving myself permission to use that time to finish other things instead, and not to use off hours to test something. I deliberately went slow here so we all could go fast in the future, together. When things are valuable to us, we need to own them together. Sharing knowledge is one thing, sharing activities is key.
• Focus on unblocking people. Teach people how to help themselves and the team and then let them do it. Let them be responsible of follow-up tasks instead of grabbing any little further todo in addition, like setting up meetings or taking notes or checking in with another person.
• Invest in upskilling people, continuously. Pairing added to that goal just as much as sharing knowledge in a fun and realistic way. For example, I gave two operations and support trainings that put my team in the actual situation of an incoming user request or an alert by our product, while also enabling them to investigate the situation and go through it. This helped a lot with sharing why this work is important, why we need to bring our pieces of knowledge together, and how to do it without making it a tedious burden yet allowing us to learn from it.
• Explain your situation and manage expectations. Share your context in any interaction. Being open and transparent with people helped a lot with their understanding and us seeing the full picture. It also allowed us to find alternative ways to accomplish things faster or with less effort.
• Find sympathetic ears. What really helped me was talking with a lot of people - people who listened and I'm ever grateful for that. Sharing your situation and speaking out loud helps reflection and becoming clear that this is not a situation to stay in. It sometimes triggered other ideas what to try, or re-established my confidence in doing my job; yet even if it only helped make the other aware of my situation, talking already helped.
• Refrain from taking on more on top. Saying "no", "not yet", "not me". A lot. If you can't (as priorities change, right?) communicate what goes instead - you can't do everything at once.
• Connect people. Instead of taking things on your own desk, empower others to do so. Sometimes all there's needed is to make people visible and connect them.
• Reduce your cognitive load and singletask. Wherever possible. Do one thing at a time and complete that one thing at a time before tackling the next one. Sometimes more stuff comes in on which you can't decide right away, yet instead of keeping this in the head just park it in a todo list or similar. Anything that freed my thinking capacity to focus on the current task at hand helped. Sometimes it also meant getting rid of a few smaller and less important things just to free my mind again for the big important impactful one. Anything to get calmer or stay calm enough and maintain thinking capacity. If I'm drowning, my biggest value is gone: being there for people, going deep thinking in different perspectives and creating bridges and connecting people, driving experiments and inspiring change. So I'd rather should help 10 people not 100. Spreading myself too thin does not work.
• Consider unplanned work. No matter what we do, we will discover new things as we go. Whether it's the tooling that suddenly does not want to work with us anymore, or incidents taking over priority, or a personal crisis. Some things will happen and shift previous plans. We need to keep this in mind and enable us to act on new insights quickly.
• Maintain your own space. I need space to drive testing and quality topics in my team. I need space to contribute pro-actively. I need space to help other teams and people in the company as well. I need space to be helpful. The safer I feel and the more space within constraints I have, the more ideas I get and think positively about my work and the impact we can have together. Sometimes I just needed space to tackle a few things on my todo list - so I'm really thankful for my team giving me this space. Yet remember: filling the day with back to back calls is the opposite of maintaining space.
• Make space for others to step up. My new team achieved a lot of things I wanted to drive forward just by getting the space to do so. Together, we finally tackled some long waiting improvement points. We introduced integration tests for consuming Kafka messages, added template testing for our frontend, increased the level of observability of our backend, introduced actual feature flags to decouple deploying from releasing, integrated first accessibility testing to tackle this increasingly important quality aspect, and introduced user tracking with Hotjar to get even more data and make more informed product decisions. Yes, I nudged a bit on all these topics, yet most of this was achieved by my teammates with me getting out of the way.
• Reclaim your calendar. Setting my work and private calendars to tentative helped me a lot. This can serve as a signal to others looking for free slots and having them reach out to me directly, yet it mostly served as a signal to myself when looking at my calendar. Screaming in my face: "no more extra meetings during this time, don't schedule or accept if not absolutely needed".
• Reclaim your inboxes. Responding to private emails only on weekends; just because this way no further response could come in between and add to my load.
• Prioritize sleep. This grew very important, especially after my body made clear my stress levels are too high. Cutting on sleeping hours is never the way to go.
• Make space for "me time", no matter what. Canceling private appointments to get a little me time here and then. Even if I just used it to watch another episode of my current series. Anything to distract my mind from work.
• Accept what you cannot change. We don't have everything in our hands. Accepting this can be hard, yet many times I can only change how I cope with what comes.
• Be okay with being not okay and focus on finding a way back to okay. As soon as possible. In the end it boils down to that. I cannot be of any help to others, especially on the long run, if I don't take care of myself. Remember the oxygen mask and why we need to put it on ourselves first.
• Take time to socialize and have a good time with people. With my new team starting to grow together, I drew a lot of energy from any social moment we had, great conversations as well as having fun playing a game together. I desperately need the bonding and building these relationships on more than just work topics.
• Celebrate achievements. I sometimes really need to acknowledge what I managed to do and allow myself to feel not only overwhelmed but also take in good energy from these achievements. The trick is: even if I don't feel like it, celebrate nonetheless. With the responses the good feelings come along. Looking back I'm thankful I did and can now feel more proud than at that point in time.

  What a day at work this was! 🔥 Gave an ensemble talk, prepared a leadership workshop, gave an operations training, had sessions with both my mentee and coachee, and successfully delivered a milestone release with my awesome team! 🎉💪🏻 May the next days be calmer. 😌

  — Lisi Hocke (@lisihocke) April 29, 2021

With all that, after half a year, I finally feel I'm in a better place again. Most of the topics on my desk that had absolute dates attached are done, people around me are finally enabled to help out, and I have capacity again to deal with what's still there while remembering not to take on too many new ones at a time. The rest can wait, there's a time coming for that.

Huge kudos and gratitude to my new team - I really appreciate you for stepping up big time, feeling responsible for the whole product and team, for more than your own area of expertise. For being ready to take over unfamiliar things outside your comfort zone. For sharing the load and helping each other. For learning every day with each other. For experimenting. For really having my back when I went on vacation or spoke at a conference. For listening. For sending me on vacation early. I know some of you feel you're just doing your work - yet let me make this clear again: yes, you are doing your work, and I appreciate you for doing it well.

Such a good feeling when you leave on vacation and know your teammates have your back. They got this, all of this - including glue work. I don't need to worry one bit, can fully rest & relax. Loving my new team and not taking this for granted - really proud of them! 💜

— Lisi Hocke (@lisihocke) June 2, 2021

Huge kudos to so many people of our lovely communities - thank you all for listening to me in this time or for bearing with me canceling appointments, not accepting pairing requests anymore, and not being there for a lot of things. I am coming back to all the lovely community stuff, yet I need to remember to use my energies wisely and look for synergies where I can.

Huge kudos to my friends for reaching out, and especially to my best friend and sister Marlene Guggenberger - thank you for honoring me as first listener of your first novels (which are amazing, so people who understand German should definitely check them out!). I loved the live reading as the story progressed, it was the time off my head that I needed on many of these days and hence a real life saver for me! Not taken for granted.

People, it's released!!! 📘📚🎉 "Zauber und andere Missgeschicke" - I loved this enchanting story told by the amazing @YDubhcat. 😍🪄 If you understand German, get your hands on it directly from the publisher or your favorite online book store! ➡️ https://t.co/fPlNoMjYoZ https://t.co/vbaN1bT91U

— Lisi Hocke (@lisihocke) March 24, 2021

The one most helpful thing I've learned to prevent a situation as described above worked also as the way out of it. Dear future me. I am not alone.

the next time

your device

is low on battery,

and asking for a charge,

don't.

just

watch

the panicked notifications

accumulate

and the bright red meter

count to zero

and the glowing screen

fade to lifeless black

and think

hard

about your own

battery.

— Computer Facts (@computerfact) June 7, 2021