Musings On Stress

This weekend I have a ton of work I need to do.  One evening earlier this week, I squished a bug that  had been bothering me for a while in KidChart, one of my shipping apps.  Instead of submitting a new version with just that one bug fix, I want to get one full work-flow session under UI Automation testing to see if there are any other bugs I should be fixing as well.

I also learned in a marketing exercise that I need to make some changes in the way I’m marketing KidChart (although I’m not sure exactly what - I need to change and measure and iterate and see where I get).

This week, I also got some data I’ve been waiting on from a client, so I’m now unblocked from finishing the first revision of the App I’m writing with him.

Very stressful - but it’s the good kind of stress.

You see, I have this theory that stress comes in two varieties.  There’s the stress where you hate your job, but you can’t really do anything about it; the economy is bad, you need the benefits, something.  That’s the same stress as when you’re waiting, maybe on medical test results or something.  It’s debilitating, but it can’t do anything but eat you up inside, and you just have to try to stay calm.

And then there’s the good stress.  The stress that you can do something about.  Approaching the end of a job and not having the next one lined up is that kind of stress for me.  It pushes me to do the things that normally I hate doing, like asking people I’ve worked with before if they know of anyone who is hiring, or putting off more interesting activities to focus on grinding out the work that needs to get done, even if it isn’t the fun part of the project, and I’m not going to learn anything from it.  Because even though I might rather be doing something else, I know what to do to make the stress go away.

So enough blogging for now.  I have work to do.