context switching is burning me out.

it’s been a little over two months since i’ve been in san francisco full time and i think i’ve been lo o s i n g myself.

seriously, i don’t want to adopt a debby downer mentality, but the one upside is this: a lot of introspective food for thought. left new york city on a whim. packed my suitcases hurriedly after new york tech week. forgot my journal and a bunch of other knick knacks i didn’t know i needed. i’d like to attribute my half-baked thoughts to this very action and my stubbornness behind not getting a new journal. not because it’s physically taxing, but because it morally feels unjust to leave one chapter out of the segment. so what you’re seeing is an aftereffect of the spontaneous.

but why would anyone want to move to san francisco by choice? especially as an unemployed, new york city born and bred, creative intersect engineer type of person? for a few main reasons, to say the least.

get a job become more technical force myself to live alone without the shortcut proximity of what’s truly home (my childhood home) at first, it was good paradoxically. i think my freedom and creativity and happiness were at a lukewarm 6 while the cost of living with a rigid budget in the city docked the rating a full four points. but somewhere along the way, the debt caught on to me and i missed home. i was almost going to give up after not finding a real job and go home.

a job that doesn’t feel like an extension of a team and isn’t bound by a paper called a contract. a job that pushes me technically and creatively and gives me fulfillment.

new york city would’ve been painstakingly cheaper. the mta caps its subway rides at $35 a week, i’d get home cooked food or make it myself with groceries from the good ol’ chinese supermarket. but the sad thing is, i couldn’t even afford a plane ticket above my means to go back.

so i got a job. it was right around where things started making sense. the content hit deep, the event was being planned, life was feeling busy but meaningful. and then two days later, i started the work trial.

to this day, i’d like to argue i’m loosing my juices a little bit. it all feels new to me, because it’s confusing but has a good connotation. experimentation is scary, because it’s this limbo stage where you have to collect data points by tinkering around finding what works and what doesn’t. some of your work, you just have to accept that it will never be used again. and arguably, the worst part of this feels like you aren’t making progress, because you’re jumping around from project a to campaign b and aren’t taking full ownership of an asset that makes it yours. sometimes, i’ll jump around from granola to slack to the terminal, and back to linear, thinking, “we are back at square one”. sometimes, i feel hypocritical because i wrote and foreshadowed the exact same productivity phenomena today seven months prior.

in a sense, i know i’m context switching behind the multiple hats i wear for an early stage team. every switch is a bit of a lag, so maybe it’s time to find a way to orchestrate my systems a little more fluidly. we have four hour blocks dedicated to single-tasked deep work.

the more i find out, the more easier and fun it is. doesn’t that sound nice.