AaronWe are adopting scrum + Jira at work. The combination of the change in routine and the new stress of publicly reporting and tracking my progress every day has my life dominated by anxiety right now. And the more anxious I get, the harder it is to focus. So I end up doing my work late at night, when I'm too tired to feel anxious, but that only leaves a narrow band of time between too anxious and too tired, and I'm losing sleep too. IDK what to do in this situation, but I know I have to figure something out, so that's more pressure and anxiety. I'm also struggling to find the words to talk to my boss about it, which is part of why I'm writing about it here.
Nate Gaylinn@hosford42 The best way to think about these work tracking productivity systems (if you can--depends a lot on team culture) is not about setting an aggressive pace that you should follow, but getting a sense of what sort of pace is realistic. Like, it doesn't matter how much you get done this week, or if you fell short off your targets. The point is to learn from that experience so you make a better estimate next week. Eventually you get pretty good at estimating your productivity, and you become reliable because you don't over promise.
If you can think of it as an exercise in learning realistic expectations, it's generally way less stressful.
@ngaylinn But how do you reconcile that with the fact that it's the same person who fills out your performance reviews?
@hosford42 It depends. Did your boss say why they started doing this, or how it relates to your performance expectations? If they're trying to drive everyone to do more in less time, that's messed up, it won't work very well, and there's not much you can do about that except leave. But I definitely wouldn't assume that's the case. Usually it's more about improving team communication, coordination, and reliability. Or it's just copycatting some other team, to be honest. But some managers are really bad at explaining themselves, so people jump to conclusions and get anxious about it...
@ngaylinn The change isn't coming from my immediate boss, but from higher up. My boss is communicating fine. I just don't know how to not be anxious about having to present my daily progress to the same person who does my performance reviews, whatever the intent. It is inherently stressful, because no matter what people say, it's not possible for a human being to truly compartmentalize sources of knowledge and experience. My day to day interactions of this sort *will* impact my performance reviews. It's not a thing that can be controlled, limited, or prevented, even if that's the intent.
Not a Spring Onion[We already had this discussion a while ago, so I will summarize:]
I think your company simply does Scrum wrong.
Turning standups into reportings is... well, they apparently want to pay you for worrying instead of working.