Churning Mind

Last week was another period of incessant thinking. I cancelled the business continuity test as the stakeholder requested to postpone due to another application going live that week. There was just too much downtime during the week. Stopping work at the warehouse for a few hours may impact sales especially with the promotion that is occurring every month. The fact that the economy is showing signed of being affected by the uncertainty in government.  

Such is the underlying situation with the seemingly confusion and turmoil happening at the highest level is causing businesses and ordinary people like me to have anxiety. There is too much happening from the tariff situation, Ukraine war, trade war, labor decline that some pundits are forecasting some dire times ahead. There is no immediate impact in terms of high prices as inflation is being manged by business by absorbing high tariff cost. 

The consequence is the reduction in staff or the pause in investment until more clarity is provided by the government.Contributing to the turmoil are the court cases saying these activities are illegal; from tariff, deportations and firing of government officials. Such as mess that everyone seem to be taking all these events in stride though their mental health may be suffering in the background. This is the situation I find myself reading these news while having challenges at the office.

I know a vacation is needed or at least time off when I feel agitated, where I get anxious meeting my colleagues in the office where I get paranoid unnecessarily seeing a different meaning behind every comments. My boss in our regular one on one meeting was also critical of the outcome of my project where I had to postpone the implementation despite frequent steering committee meeting. The steering committee is meant to provide guidance and approval so these actions that I made are sanctioned by the committee.

On another project that started this year, the other challenge is the priorities and capacity for the work squads who will work on this project. The squad are overloaded and at full capacity that they frankly don't have time to work on my project. I had reached out to the squad leads and product owners and had several meetings to no avail. It's no one's fault that there is a lot of work and my project unfortunately has the lower priority compared with the other project being worked on.

So I had to take the punches and accept the inevitable outcome which is to postpone or re-schedule my project activities until the team have time or at the right moment when stakeholder are okay with the impact to operations. It's been a challenging year for me that I get 'impostor syndrome' ; that I am not good enough or that I am over the hill and should retire. I sometimes regret not accepting the early-retirement package but I am also anxious of running out of money.

I helped my son moved in the townhouse that I had been renting hoping to put more stability in his life with lower rents and a larger place for him to enjoy. I should have asked him to move earlier and I though it was good to have an experience of making it on his own. I have 4 to 5 year lefts of working in the company and I am planning on my retirement or rather my life after retirement. A time where I start something new and have a new vision of myself that is refreshing and vital and meaningful instead of just being a tired old man.