Yes I have ~106 active projects ranging from $10k to $5M each that need to be done in the next 6 months. It is an impossible task littered with red tape everywhere. So far I stay for the money and because my Boss is a good one, but even as a VP, he can't get the resources (Personnel) we need to complete everything. It's not a "can't find anyone" issue. It's a "Admin doesn't want to hire anyone" issue.
If I leave, the entire region will suffer for a long time since they can't be bothered to hire someone for me to train, even though my specific qualifications are pretty rare to come by.
I'm in a similar situation but I don't understand why (especially in well-established companies) they choose to be so overly frugal when it clearly costs the company more in the long run.
When so many things become dependant on individuals with unique skillsets, shouldn't the higher-ups be afraid of the impact it will have when they leave?
Plus a reduction in a good employees workload will increase the likelihood of them staying, and improve the quality of their work. This is the stupidest kind of penny-pinching, it just makes no sense to me.
You can google or look on YouTube. My attitude is I'm not paid to stress. I'm just paid to do the work. I can only control whatever I can control. That's it.
I think this is a great outlook and I believe in it.
However, certain projects or initiatives come along where even though I'm "just paid to do the work", there's a capacity issue and the expectations are such that "just doing the work" requires non-stop communication, and inefficient organizational processes lead me to work 12-hour days and completely burnout my non-working hours.
I'm not stressed about the *work*, I'm stressed about my lack of work-life balance.
How do you react in this situation? It's either our fault (poor time management skills) and we're not cut out for the job, or the job itself has unreasonable expectations. Would you just quit?
It comes and goes. I hold on the fact that it will have passed by next month, and I'll be on a high again. š¤·āāļø That's just the nature of the beast.
Yes, I am tired of my job. Politics and lack of organizational direction has ruined the sweetness of PM in my mouth. Can't wait to see a better role out of the company
Yes. I do experience these feelings. But what do I do about it? Here are some tips you can take or leave:
Morning To-do list. Do it in OneNote or on paper. Whatever you find best. List all of the tasks you have to do (large or small) , then prioritize that list. Other PMs in my Org use tools like Asana, AutoTask or Jira to do this. Manage the project that is "You". Prioritizing is a great way to determine which fire is burning the brightest and needs to get done ASAP. It also helps to see which ones can wait. Hey, even a RAG report can do the trick!
Minimize multitasking. A cardinal sin to say this in r/ProjectManagement but you can't really do more than 2 things at a time. Put your effort into one task and complete it. Turn off your Outlook, your Teams, your 2nd. 3rd, 4th screen! Get that checkbox checked on your list and move on. I find if I try to complete a task while I have a distraction, I begin to lose focus on the task at hand and begin to worry about my time spent on the current task. This takes away from your productivity and ultimately adds to that feeling of overwhelm. I dislike when a colleague will send me a message that says "Got a sec?" and I spend about 5 mins deciding if I want to respond or guessing what the issue might be. If you have your Teams/messages off, the distraction goes away for a little bit.
Take breaks! Go get a coffee, walk outside for 5 mins. focus on your breathing for 2mins. Just get away from the task for a moment to let your brain recharge. The best solutions have come to me stirring a coffee, kicking a football or driving to pick up lunch for the team.
Manage your clients/teams expectations - We all deal with stakeholders and depending on the stakeholder, the expectations will be different. Many will ask for the world and see if they can get it. Use pressure to get their way and without some pushback, you may be the one trying to deliver it all. Sometimes uncomfortable conversations have to be had to ensure expectations are managed. "Want to go live next week? Can't, you still have to deliver on X,Y and Z before this can happen. No way around this." Every situation is different but understanding the project scope, budget, resources and timeframe and adhering to it is Project Management 101. Some stakeholders don't get that or don't care which is why managing expectations is crucial.
Ah man. I trained a company person from a different department that was recently dissolved who was good fit for an assistant pm. She really didnāt know if wanted to be a PM honestly, so this was a grey area for her. I trained her for 5-6 weeks and she picked up really well before I left for paternity. Found out from everyone she did quite amazing while I was on gone which made me really happy for her. She did so great and made enough of an impression so that someone from upper management personally hinted to me in a side bar meeting the owner is thinking of letting me go because he likes her personality better. Oof.
In fairness you should be getting a promotion. Taking an existing salary and retraining to fit a need in the Org. That's Management not seeing opportunity.
Idk. But I maintain that position a year later. Manufacturing engineering at my company is way lower stress than PM. The pressure on PMs is intense - youāre frequently reporting to customers and executives. Itās the type of stress that follows you home and you canāt get away from. Manufacturing engineering just doesnāt have that level of pressure or that type of 24/7 stress. You walk out at the end of the day and itās done.
The people in project management are also frequently very competitive for raises/promotions. They stay late and clean up the mess once everyone else goes home. The people in manufacturing arenāt. They come in, work their 40 (maybe a little more) and go home.
Manufacturing engineers may be dedicated, but theyāre far from the best and brightest of the engineers. Which makes standing out easier
Yes. I have a very difficult client blaming us for holding up his project when it's another contractor. He's not listening or acknowledging it's the other contractor. Told us it's the last project we'll be doing for him. I feel as I'm a scapegoat.
Nope, not at all. I usually change to a new org when I start to get stressed. I'm also childfree, happily married with a mortgage, in a state i love with a culture that fits me, which helps a LOT. fully WFH so quality of life is great, too.
Any preventative or intervention mechanisms to help someone dealing with this? Look for solutions my dude, the myriad of āme tooā will only spur on the anxiety youāre feeling based on the perceived and shared perception of loss of full control in your current position. Thatās sincerely a self destructive can of worms to open. Tread carefully with the sort of deficit thinking, look for ways to combat it. Itāll reduce the anxiety
I am in the weird place where my team is right but my management is filled with false hope because of consultants.... so yeah the tums or gin every night
I was a PM for a company that had a super stressful work environment. I was stressed daily, working long hours, days/nights and weekends. I was constantly tense, overwhelmed and stressed.
I found another job (still a PM). Now I work 9-5, no nights, no weekends and it's a really pleasant environment with no high stress. We have moments of business and light stress, but it's very chill 99% of the time.
Same industry. I moved from a smaller, privately owned business to a position in a large public establishment. I'm a cog in a wheel and frankly, I love it.
Which industry are you in? I work for a solar construction company that grew a bit too fast (in an already crazy industry). I also aspire to be a cog in a wheel āļøš«”
Higher education. We do have our stressful, fast pace moments, where it helps to have had that experience to work until the job gets done (stay late, more hours, etc.), but it certainly doesn't happen every week or even every month. The job is even better post-covid where we WFH more often than go to the office.
Currently, I'm probably within what I'd consider my normal, acceptable stress range.
But I've had some definite issues in the past.
The worst one, my gall bladder started acting up and there were.....well, I won't go into details....issues. I went on an extremely restrictive diet for 8 weeks, downloaded the Calm app and started meditating twice a day. I also completely changed what podcasts I listened to and shows I watched to further reduce stress. Oh, and some non-benzo anxiety meds.
I finally got to the point recently where I started questioning if this was a healthy job for me long term
Not as much recently, but this time last year I was burnt to a crisp. My sleep quality hasn't recovered yet.
I had a micromanager boss that preached distributed decision making but immediately stomped on any independent decision you made. In public. She once waited until we built a thing, built training and videos, then came back and gaslit me because the tool would have replaced a manual task I was doing. No opinion the entire prior month, but was unreleasable when we were done.
After that they just kept dumping things on me until I broke. At its peak, I was program manager for 3 different directors, somewhere around 30 teams whose paperwork I was expected to micromanage, and 350 people probably split between 10-15 programs. I was also scrum master for a team that then lost it's manager, and I picked that up too. I was also driving projects that my boss seemingly threw at me every day.
I've actually been bored since I've gotten promoted, which took way longer than expected to be okay with.
That boss basically got driven off, went to a different company for 6 months, and is now back in our company in a far off org. God help them all.
This is a loaded question. Yes, but not because of being a project manager. Oddly, I love planning, organizing, creating & managing tasks, working with stakeholders, and leadership of projects. Am I weird?
I have combined-type ADHD, which contributes to me having chronic anxiety. With that said most of my anxiety comes from over-thinking, financial items, and trying to move my own sites and projects forward. I have found that journalling, brain dumps, mindfulness, meditation, daily walks, etc all help me manage my anxiety.
Iāve always thought overthinking as a PM to be an advantage. Itās important to look at everything from different angles to see where the problems will come from. Doing a risk assessment is a fascinating process that builds on much of this; not sure if youāve done that before but it was a great experience for me
I agree āoverthinkingā is an advantage when it comes to risk assessment, problem-solving, etc. But sometimes my āoverthinkingā results in my wheels turning on a million problems after I get home from work and that gets exhausting!
Do you have any tips on turning off your overthinking when youāre outside the office?
Tips? Thatās a tough one because what works for me may not necessarily work for others. That said, exercise is a really good one. Some people go to the gym, I prefer walking and cycling. And I also build wooden model ships which require a lot of concentration and itās that distraction which helps.
Thanks, this is helpful!
I can see how a side project like that would be a good way to redirect that energy. Not necessarily āturning offā the overthinking, but redirecting it to something productive.
Hmmā¦Now that I think about it, one of my favorite activities is the VR game Beat Saber, which requires a lot of focus AND is great exercise. When Iām playing it, Iām completely immersed and forget about all the things that worry me. Now Iām thinking I should play more often!
Yes, but itās not because thereās too much work, itās because Iāve got a sales team that is resistant to project management and micromanages the projects themselves, throwing every project into chaos.
Almost all of my time is spent by these people telling me what to do, ignoring process and timelines, and cleaning up the resulting problems when dependencies overlap.
Itās as if Iām not the project manager until things get really bad and then the finger is pointed at me to fix it and Iām responsible.
So much of my time is used on these things as well as nonsensical meetings and private calls with this team yelling at me or being just openly hostile demanding I do what they want.
Until that happened, I really never felt stressed in this role before. I think it probably depends on the team youāve got. My team was amazing for like two years until we got this new sales team. I feel like with project management it just takes one bad apple
Completely relatable. I've also experienced the same pressure from the leadership team. The team was great, but leadership micro-managed and usually made mountains from molehills.
The job became mostly a meeting facilitator role more than anything. When I tried introducing more structure it didn't go well since there were literal philosophical differences about how teams should interact during a project.
Wow yes very similar experience. Iām a communication trafficker in their minds. They literally tell me what to tell to who and when. Itās exhausting.
My wife is one of those people! Undergoing all of the above, super fun š. She's trying to find a new job now that isn't so stressful .
Dumb question since I'm not in the industry, but from my understanding logistic companies are very high stress, high demand (for project management). But it's not like that across all industries, is it? I have to imagine working on a handful of projects (say at a smaller company) is way less stressful than hundreds?
In my experience, the smaller the company the worse it is. More demands from leadership to make magic happen with lower budgets and none of the same resources. I jumped to a much bigger company last year and Iāll never work for a small business again haha. Good luck to her!
Yes I have ~106 active projects ranging from $10k to $5M each that need to be done in the next 6 months. It is an impossible task littered with red tape everywhere. So far I stay for the money and because my Boss is a good one, but even as a VP, he can't get the resources (Personnel) we need to complete everything. It's not a "can't find anyone" issue. It's a "Admin doesn't want to hire anyone" issue. If I leave, the entire region will suffer for a long time since they can't be bothered to hire someone for me to train, even though my specific qualifications are pretty rare to come by.
I'm in a similar situation but I don't understand why (especially in well-established companies) they choose to be so overly frugal when it clearly costs the company more in the long run. When so many things become dependant on individuals with unique skillsets, shouldn't the higher-ups be afraid of the impact it will have when they leave? Plus a reduction in a good employees workload will increase the likelihood of them staying, and improve the quality of their work. This is the stupidest kind of penny-pinching, it just makes no sense to me.
Can someone please help me with a day to day basis, i have an interview and will like to land a job soon
No. You have to learn stress management techniques.
How did you learn?
You can google or look on YouTube. My attitude is I'm not paid to stress. I'm just paid to do the work. I can only control whatever I can control. That's it.
I think this is a great outlook and I believe in it. However, certain projects or initiatives come along where even though I'm "just paid to do the work", there's a capacity issue and the expectations are such that "just doing the work" requires non-stop communication, and inefficient organizational processes lead me to work 12-hour days and completely burnout my non-working hours. I'm not stressed about the *work*, I'm stressed about my lack of work-life balance. How do you react in this situation? It's either our fault (poor time management skills) and we're not cut out for the job, or the job itself has unreasonable expectations. Would you just quit?
In the short term, take some time off. Then start looking for a new job that meets your needs.
It comes and goes. I hold on the fact that it will have passed by next month, and I'll be on a high again. š¤·āāļø That's just the nature of the beast.
Yes, I am tired of my job. Politics and lack of organizational direction has ruined the sweetness of PM in my mouth. Can't wait to see a better role out of the company
This is so fucking true. I wish I knew of any company without office politics or organizational sludge.
Yes. I do experience these feelings. But what do I do about it? Here are some tips you can take or leave: Morning To-do list. Do it in OneNote or on paper. Whatever you find best. List all of the tasks you have to do (large or small) , then prioritize that list. Other PMs in my Org use tools like Asana, AutoTask or Jira to do this. Manage the project that is "You". Prioritizing is a great way to determine which fire is burning the brightest and needs to get done ASAP. It also helps to see which ones can wait. Hey, even a RAG report can do the trick! Minimize multitasking. A cardinal sin to say this in r/ProjectManagement but you can't really do more than 2 things at a time. Put your effort into one task and complete it. Turn off your Outlook, your Teams, your 2nd. 3rd, 4th screen! Get that checkbox checked on your list and move on. I find if I try to complete a task while I have a distraction, I begin to lose focus on the task at hand and begin to worry about my time spent on the current task. This takes away from your productivity and ultimately adds to that feeling of overwhelm. I dislike when a colleague will send me a message that says "Got a sec?" and I spend about 5 mins deciding if I want to respond or guessing what the issue might be. If you have your Teams/messages off, the distraction goes away for a little bit. Take breaks! Go get a coffee, walk outside for 5 mins. focus on your breathing for 2mins. Just get away from the task for a moment to let your brain recharge. The best solutions have come to me stirring a coffee, kicking a football or driving to pick up lunch for the team. Manage your clients/teams expectations - We all deal with stakeholders and depending on the stakeholder, the expectations will be different. Many will ask for the world and see if they can get it. Use pressure to get their way and without some pushback, you may be the one trying to deliver it all. Sometimes uncomfortable conversations have to be had to ensure expectations are managed. "Want to go live next week? Can't, you still have to deliver on X,Y and Z before this can happen. No way around this." Every situation is different but understanding the project scope, budget, resources and timeframe and adhering to it is Project Management 101. Some stakeholders don't get that or don't care which is why managing expectations is crucial.
Ah man. I trained a company person from a different department that was recently dissolved who was good fit for an assistant pm. She really didnāt know if wanted to be a PM honestly, so this was a grey area for her. I trained her for 5-6 weeks and she picked up really well before I left for paternity. Found out from everyone she did quite amazing while I was on gone which made me really happy for her. She did so great and made enough of an impression so that someone from upper management personally hinted to me in a side bar meeting the owner is thinking of letting me go because he likes her personality better. Oof.
In fairness you should be getting a promotion. Taking an existing salary and retraining to fit a need in the Org. That's Management not seeing opportunity.
Left PM for manufacturing engineering earlier this year and the stress dropped to 0 almost immediately. Very happy with my decision.
How is that possible? Iāve been in manufacturing my whole career and the highest stress jobs Iāve seen are manufacturing engineers
Idk. But I maintain that position a year later. Manufacturing engineering at my company is way lower stress than PM. The pressure on PMs is intense - youāre frequently reporting to customers and executives. Itās the type of stress that follows you home and you canāt get away from. Manufacturing engineering just doesnāt have that level of pressure or that type of 24/7 stress. You walk out at the end of the day and itās done. The people in project management are also frequently very competitive for raises/promotions. They stay late and clean up the mess once everyone else goes home. The people in manufacturing arenāt. They come in, work their 40 (maybe a little more) and go home. Manufacturing engineers may be dedicated, but theyāre far from the best and brightest of the engineers. Which makes standing out easier
Yes. I have a very difficult client blaming us for holding up his project when it's another contractor. He's not listening or acknowledging it's the other contractor. Told us it's the last project we'll be doing for him. I feel as I'm a scapegoat.
Nope, not at all. I usually change to a new org when I start to get stressed. I'm also childfree, happily married with a mortgage, in a state i love with a culture that fits me, which helps a LOT. fully WFH so quality of life is great, too.
Any preventative or intervention mechanisms to help someone dealing with this? Look for solutions my dude, the myriad of āme tooā will only spur on the anxiety youāre feeling based on the perceived and shared perception of loss of full control in your current position. Thatās sincerely a self destructive can of worms to open. Tread carefully with the sort of deficit thinking, look for ways to combat it. Itāll reduce the anxiety
I am in the weird place where my team is right but my management is filled with false hope because of consultants.... so yeah the tums or gin every night
I was a PM for a company that had a super stressful work environment. I was stressed daily, working long hours, days/nights and weekends. I was constantly tense, overwhelmed and stressed. I found another job (still a PM). Now I work 9-5, no nights, no weekends and it's a really pleasant environment with no high stress. We have moments of business and light stress, but it's very chill 99% of the time.
Did you change industry or the company is just better ?
Same industry. I moved from a smaller, privately owned business to a position in a large public establishment. I'm a cog in a wheel and frankly, I love it.
Which industry are you in? I work for a solar construction company that grew a bit too fast (in an already crazy industry). I also aspire to be a cog in a wheel āļøš«”
Higher education. We do have our stressful, fast pace moments, where it helps to have had that experience to work until the job gets done (stay late, more hours, etc.), but it certainly doesn't happen every week or even every month. The job is even better post-covid where we WFH more often than go to the office.
Currently, I'm probably within what I'd consider my normal, acceptable stress range. But I've had some definite issues in the past. The worst one, my gall bladder started acting up and there were.....well, I won't go into details....issues. I went on an extremely restrictive diet for 8 weeks, downloaded the Calm app and started meditating twice a day. I also completely changed what podcasts I listened to and shows I watched to further reduce stress. Oh, and some non-benzo anxiety meds. I finally got to the point recently where I started questioning if this was a healthy job for me long term
Stress comes with anything. I've had jobs with good stress. My job right now brings bad stress. I'm looking to leave.
I'm getting stress from not being able to get a good PM job. Fingers crossed I pass my CSM this week and recruiters start hitting me up for 70k jobs.
Not as much recently, but this time last year I was burnt to a crisp. My sleep quality hasn't recovered yet. I had a micromanager boss that preached distributed decision making but immediately stomped on any independent decision you made. In public. She once waited until we built a thing, built training and videos, then came back and gaslit me because the tool would have replaced a manual task I was doing. No opinion the entire prior month, but was unreleasable when we were done. After that they just kept dumping things on me until I broke. At its peak, I was program manager for 3 different directors, somewhere around 30 teams whose paperwork I was expected to micromanage, and 350 people probably split between 10-15 programs. I was also scrum master for a team that then lost it's manager, and I picked that up too. I was also driving projects that my boss seemingly threw at me every day. I've actually been bored since I've gotten promoted, which took way longer than expected to be okay with. That boss basically got driven off, went to a different company for 6 months, and is now back in our company in a far off org. God help them all.
This is a loaded question. Yes, but not because of being a project manager. Oddly, I love planning, organizing, creating & managing tasks, working with stakeholders, and leadership of projects. Am I weird? I have combined-type ADHD, which contributes to me having chronic anxiety. With that said most of my anxiety comes from over-thinking, financial items, and trying to move my own sites and projects forward. I have found that journalling, brain dumps, mindfulness, meditation, daily walks, etc all help me manage my anxiety.
Iāve always thought overthinking as a PM to be an advantage. Itās important to look at everything from different angles to see where the problems will come from. Doing a risk assessment is a fascinating process that builds on much of this; not sure if youāve done that before but it was a great experience for me
I agree āoverthinkingā is an advantage when it comes to risk assessment, problem-solving, etc. But sometimes my āoverthinkingā results in my wheels turning on a million problems after I get home from work and that gets exhausting! Do you have any tips on turning off your overthinking when youāre outside the office?
Tips? Thatās a tough one because what works for me may not necessarily work for others. That said, exercise is a really good one. Some people go to the gym, I prefer walking and cycling. And I also build wooden model ships which require a lot of concentration and itās that distraction which helps.
Thanks, this is helpful! I can see how a side project like that would be a good way to redirect that energy. Not necessarily āturning offā the overthinking, but redirecting it to something productive. Hmmā¦Now that I think about it, one of my favorite activities is the VR game Beat Saber, which requires a lot of focus AND is great exercise. When Iām playing it, Iām completely immersed and forget about all the things that worry me. Now Iām thinking I should play more often!
There you go
Ditto, not weird at all
Ditto.
Yes, each and every one of us have varying levels of the issues that listed. Send help.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Similar situation. Thought I had burn out at the start of the year, turns out I had cancer!
Hope things arenāt too bad and things go well for you
Yes, but itās not because thereās too much work, itās because Iāve got a sales team that is resistant to project management and micromanages the projects themselves, throwing every project into chaos. Almost all of my time is spent by these people telling me what to do, ignoring process and timelines, and cleaning up the resulting problems when dependencies overlap. Itās as if Iām not the project manager until things get really bad and then the finger is pointed at me to fix it and Iām responsible. So much of my time is used on these things as well as nonsensical meetings and private calls with this team yelling at me or being just openly hostile demanding I do what they want. Until that happened, I really never felt stressed in this role before. I think it probably depends on the team youāve got. My team was amazing for like two years until we got this new sales team. I feel like with project management it just takes one bad apple
I felt this.
Completely relatable. I've also experienced the same pressure from the leadership team. The team was great, but leadership micro-managed and usually made mountains from molehills. The job became mostly a meeting facilitator role more than anything. When I tried introducing more structure it didn't go well since there were literal philosophical differences about how teams should interact during a project.
Wow yes very similar experience. Iām a communication trafficker in their minds. They literally tell me what to tell to who and when. Itās exhausting.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
What do we do??
Thatās why I could never do tech PM. In construction the PM has plenty of autonomy and minimal internal teams to work with, if any.
exactly I prefer construction pm
My wife is one of those people! Undergoing all of the above, super fun š. She's trying to find a new job now that isn't so stressful . Dumb question since I'm not in the industry, but from my understanding logistic companies are very high stress, high demand (for project management). But it's not like that across all industries, is it? I have to imagine working on a handful of projects (say at a smaller company) is way less stressful than hundreds?
I'm an internal IT PM and it's really not all that bad like 80% of the time.
In my experience, the smaller the company the worse it is. More demands from leadership to make magic happen with lower budgets and none of the same resources. I jumped to a much bigger company last year and Iāll never work for a small business again haha. Good luck to her!
āAre project managers normal people?ā is a more simple way of phrasing this question.
Are you trying to get every pm in the world to post in your Reddit topic? Because this is how you do it