No, I’m not turning into a life coach, honest :)

Just a discussion about stress, at work and in life in general. I reckon I have a pretty stress-free life, accounting for my youthful good looks (stop laughing at the back there) ;)

Much of that is due to my consciously choosing stress avoidance and mitigation work and life patterns. Contracting has the potential for being stressful, unless you actively recognise the causes of the stress (uncertainty, finances, etc.) and mitigate them. I’m generally relaxed about those parts of my job - maybe too relaxed, but it’s always worked out so far :) I’ve never been concerned about finding another contract, regardless of all the scare stories about the sector dying (which I’ve heard on and off for decades), or the government push to kill IT contracting as an industry (yup, IR35). In contract I have fun creating business value for my clients, out of contract I have fun with all the projects of my own that interest me. It’s a good life.

Good and bad stress - good stress is another term for excitement, bad stress is another term for imminent cardiovascular event. What’s the difference? I’d say the primary difference is that the former is caused by events under your control, and the latter is the emotions generated by things happening outside of your control. Bad stress is the frustration between what you want to happen, and what is actually happening and you think you have no means to influence. It’s generated when you feel helpless in a situation with no apparent choices.

I used to get stressed (the bad kind) early in my career, usually when I was in a situation where I didn’t feel confident or experienced enough to handle. I felt it when the projects I worked on hit blocks I couldn’t immediately mitigate.

Nowadays, I rarely get truly stressed. I do get irritated, granted, but am rarely in a situation where I feel out of choices. If I’m in a toxic environment, fundamentally it’s because I chose to be there. Worst case I can choose to not be there - problem solved.

When you realise that the stressful situation you’re in exists because you’re choosing to remain and attempt to deal with it, your perspective immediately changes - it becomes less frustration and more challenge. In the cases where it’s just a clusterf*ck with no apparent remedy, where everyone else seems to be dead set on not fixing the problem for their own reasons, you can just walk away.

Walking away has been an excellent stress relief over the years. If you’re in a bad situation that can’t be resolved through logic and reason, choose to not be part of it any longer. If the other parties to the situation don’t want your help in resolving it, leave them to it, let them implode. You tried, it’s no longer your concern.

I’ve had one or two contracts like that - the environment was just toxic, the people I had to work with were incompetent and/or desperately defending their little feifdoms rather than doing their jobs. They were not fun times, but vastly improved by the realisation that logic or common sense were not going to prevail… time to leave.

I’ve had colleagues in similar situations with different coping strategies, usually keeping their head down, putting up with the crap and continuing billing. If their project failed it wasn’t their problem, they still got paid. I like winning too much to willingly sit on a deathmarch project, so I leave when it becomes apparent I’m in a fight I can’t win. Fortunately that has happened only a couple of times in my career.

When you realise that situations aren’t as lacking in choices as it first appears, stress reduces. A miserable situation can turn into a merely challenging one.

I’ve had a few projects that were high in the other (good) kind of stress. There seems to be a correlation where good stress situations are technical in cause - a project to deliver by a certain date, and bad stress situations seem to be caused by people or process. Projects under tight time pressure are fun. Makes the work days exciting, not miserable.

I used to enter programming competitions with friends earlier in my career - they had much the same feeling. Needing to complete a set of tasks under very tight time pressure. Competing against very smart people worldwide. It was exciting, and had the feeling I try to keep in high pressure contracts. When you’re thinking and typing as fast as you possibly can and you’re laughing, you’ve got the good kind of stress. When you’re swearing and angry instead of laughing, you’re in the bad stress situation.

Steps to mitigate the bad stress:

  • Identify the cause - it’s not necessarily the simple fact of the workload or the time pressure. Identify the place where you think there is no control or choice - that is most likely the cause of the stress.

  • Avoid the avoidable causes - if there is a single person or group of people causing the stress, find ways around them. Escalate if necessary - make getting past them your team lead or manager’s problem (that’s why they get paid the big bucks ;) ).

  • Structure and schedule your workload better - if the primary cause is time - imminent deadlines, triage the work you have to do. Be realistic about work you are capable of doing well (individually or as a team) in the given timeframe. If the essential work can fit into that amount of capacity, focus on that and push the rest to one side.

    If you can’t fit the essential work into the capacity, you’re doomed - no point continuing stressing about it. You tried - there’s no point getting a heart attack over the physically impossible. When you make that situation clear to the stakeholders, frequently some of that set of essentials becomes not quite as essential as previously thought. Better to have that conversation early, before the team break themselves.

    If the stress is coming from no particular deadline but a steady overload of work, manage it better (yes, not hugely helpful). Learn to say no to stakeholders. Make your planning and capacity more transparent to stakeholders - you have capacity X, you are not going to attempt to do more than X amount of stories per timeframe, regardless of how much they jump up and down.

    Once you have rules of engagement with them as to how they can choose the order but not the quantity of work to be done, or when it is acceptable to bump work up the priority queue (to replace existing work, not add to it), things become less stressed. You can then focus on doing the work rather than panicking about all the work you’re not doing. In the long run you’re actually giving them a better customer experience by having a stable, predictable output.

  • Learn when to cut your losses - in toxic situations, learn when the best response is just walking away. Regardless of how much your office life rules your day and possibly stresses you, in the end it’s just a job. Unless you have signed a really bad contract, you’re not imprisoned there, and there are generally other options available.

    It’s easier for contractors, as the mindset of leaving and going somewhere else is our normal business practice - one contract ends, we go get another. I guess leaving is a bit scarier for permanent staff, but the fact is in our industry moving between companies is normal practice. If you’re in a bad, stressful situation in your current location, and you can’t see another way to fix it, polishing up that CV is probably better for your health than staying and being miserable.

It’s down to recognising that there are choices, you are rarely as out of control as you think.

Shared at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stress-dealing-donal-stewart