Reframing Accomplishment

Today was a rough day at work, but I’m working on looking at it from a different perspective.

Last night right before I left for the day, a coworker reported an issue with something I was working on that was blocking his work. After looking into it, I realized his problem was caused by a problem I’d been trying to resolve for several weeks.

I put yet another bandaid on the problem, got him unblocked, and called it a day with a plan of spending today, finally resolving the root cause. I was also optimistic because my team lead and I had discussed this issue before the holiday break. He had an idea to resolve the issue.

I knew the problem, and I had a path forward; it was going to be a good day, and I was finally going to resolve a nagging issue that kept cropping up in unexpected places to give me a headache.

Unfortunately, that idea didn’t work, and neither did the four other things I tried. I wrapped my day up by talking with my team lead as we spitballed some more possible solutions. As we got off the call, I commented about how I didn’t feel like I accomplished anything today. This was when he laid down some wisdom that I’ve heard before, but I keep forgetting.

Accomplishing something does not require committing code. Today I found five more ways that won’t fix this problem. That is something, and it has moved us forward.

My lesson from today is that while I did not resolve the problem I set out to, that doesn’t mean I didn’t accomplish anything.