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Not long ago, I felt totally underwater at work. However, I found an unexpected source of reassurance, which I want to share with you today.

Perhaps you can relate: it felt like there weren’t enough hours in the day. I just couldn’t focus.

I had so many ongoing projects and conversations that I didn’t know where to start.

I work in technical support, so the main measure of my output is the number of customer questions (or ‘tickets’) I reply to in a day, and then how much project work I get done outside of that.

When I looked around, everybody seemed to be meeting their ticket goals with ease and smashing out project work like it was nothing.

Meanwhile, I was struggling to meet relatively low daily ticket goals, and I was totally overwhelmed with what projects to be working on outside of that.

It actually got to the point where a big opportunity slipped away from me (this really stung).

I have a colleague called Fred (not his real name). I look up to him as an example of how to do this job well.

Fred and I both write articles for our product’s Help Center. This is an additional responsibility on the side of our core ticket work.

Fred is an incredibly prolific writer, and always seems to be on top of his tickets as well as the writing.

I didn’t understand how he was doing it!

Of course, I suspected that others maybe weren’t as tranquil on the inside as they were displaying on the outside, but I knew I was struggling and falling behind, and there were some real signs that I wasn’t keeping up.

I received direct feedback that my lack of consistency on tickets was hindering my career progression. This sucked to hear, but it was so useful to know.

The turning point

I decided to share what I was feeling via a candid post on our company messaging app, and interestingly, Fred reached out.

He explained that he was feeling very similarly to me.

We spoke about how overwhelming the nature of the work can be, which was very cathartic.

What truly surprised me, though, was this:

Fred felt like he was falling behind, and had actually been looking up to me as an example of somebody who was on top of their work!

Without realising it, both of us were struggling with our workloads, looking at what the other person was doing in admiration, and feeling like they didn’t measure up.

We were both surprised, but also reassured, to hear that the other person saw us so positively.

What I learned

This confirmed to me that we’re generally pretty bad judges of our own work, whether that’s quality, quantity, impact, or any other measure.

Having honest conversations with those around you can help recalibrate your expectations.

I came away from this conversation feeling something I now describe as ‘melancholy comfort’.

What do I mean by that? Reassurance that you’re not alone in your suffering.

In the book Reasons to Be Hopeful, I read a beautiful articulation of this common predicament:

“Our spirits can be sunk by the punishing impression that everyone else is content and that we are alone in our misery. Accordingly, there is relief to be felt in remembering that suffering is widespread.”

If this idea resonates with you, I highly recommend checking out the book Reasons to Be Hopeful by The School of Life. It’s full of this kind of reassurance.

As always, if you want to chat about anything, hit ‘reply’.

Until next week,

John