When I joined a new company recently, I found myself in a classic newbie situation that often happens with me when I end up in a new environment: I try hard to leave the best impression in the shortest time possible. It’s like a personal tradition I never fully outgrew. I don’t change jobs often, so by the time I do, I almost forget the taste of the first couple of months — and here I go again.
The thing with my transitions each time is that it’s outside of my comfort zone, as otherwise, the growth slows down. So, each time I can’t just “do what I’m good at”, I’m leveling up one or another (often in numerous) skills. This time it was about the size of the company and the pace of the delivery.
There wasn’t much space to ease in as I had to jump right into the current, while still learning where the river even flows. I certainly was excited, but I was also going full throttle from day one, trying to master everything at once: my onboarding, building a new team, improving existing processes, alignment, delivery speed, and figuring out the unspoken rules.
At some point, the situation felt eerily familiar. Not as a sudden realization, more like déjà vu with a set of snapshots attached. I’ve done this before: when I joined the regional court after a district one, when I first stepped into production at Full HP, during my intense start with Penny & Flo, and later when I was tasked with setting up a studio in Cyprus while adapting to a new country again.
Each time, I saw the warning signs and each time, I ignored them — just like when you go to Adonis Waterfalls and the road is completely screwed up but the happy sign says “Good for all vehicles!” (which is a lie, you get stuck on the hill in your little rental car).
This blend of ambition and self-pressure always sneaks up in similar ways: canceling hobbies, shortening lunch breaks, saying “just one more thing” well into the evening. And while no one explicitly asked me to run faster than everyone else, I still did. Because I wanted to prove something. To whom? Not sure. Probably myself. This is a blessing and a curse, as in the end, the most demanding person in the room is you, setting the expectations bar higher and higher.
When I came to Denmark, I almost punished myself for each wrong step on the way to proving myself, while the onboarding period was quite forgiving and the team was welcoming. Looking back at that period recently, I thought, “How stupid of me to go crazy like that”. These reflections of the past helped deal with it this time, along with a few hints that helped tame the situation before it went too far.
The first hint was the color-coded calendar I wrote about in Discipline is Freedom. Suddenly, the “guitar”, “writing”, and “Hunter-time” blocks were getting skipped or rescheduled. I caught myself blanking when friends asked what games I’d played or what movie I watched this week. The answer was “None”.
The second hint was my dog’s sad eyes when I skipped the usual tug-of-war session for the third evening in a row.
The last one was when Saturday started looking suspiciously like a workday.
I thought that enough is enough and went back to basics and reviewed some of my blog posts, as I knew that the Past Me had some solid advice. So I followed it, tweaking my current recipe:
- Reblocked my working hours and treated lunch like a real meeting.
- Snoozed non-essential notifications after working hours.
- Reduced screen time after hours and started charging my phone in another room.
- Reviewed all the hobbies and decided to complete the open loops instead of starting new ones or doing several things in parallel (have some writing project that I really enjoy, which slowed down the blog frequency recently).
- Strengthened my physical activity routine to add more time when my brain is busy overcoming real obstacles instead of imaginary ones.
I also reviewed my workflows, automated where I could (some AI tools really do save time, like MacWhisper), improved delegating flow, used templates, cut out double work, and noise.
I was lucky that the majority of the solutions were already laid down in my blog; I just had to follow my own advice once again and remind myself how efficient I could be by fine-tuning dozens of cogs here and there.
This took a couple of weeks to settle in, but once it did, I felt the shift. More clarity. A bit more laughter in team chats. Fewer forgotten breaks.
The difficult part with setting boundaries is that you might feel guilty about that at first. How could I just close my laptop at some point and go to the gym, forgetting about work? Easy: without that trip to gym, you will not offload and stretch, which will lead to slower thinking and back pains, and so to reduced productivity. Everything you do in your day is interconnected, intertwined, and you have to maximize the positive effect of one thing on another — that is the art of planning that excites me as a manager.
I had to remind myself that rest isn’t the opposite of ambition — it’s what fuels it. That’s strategy.
And here’s the expected outcome: with sharper focus, I actually got more done. Same goals with better energy = fewer hours.
So here’s a future-proof checklist for myself (and maybe for you, too):
- Check your calendar. What keeps getting canceled?
- Look at your evenings. Are you actually resting or replacing one crunch with another?
- Track your signals.
- Audit your workflow and recalibrate.
Burnout doesn’t happen in one blow — it’s dozens of skipped walks, snoozed hobbies, and postponed self-check-ins. But recovery works the same way: one boundary at a time.
A reminder for future self: if you ever end up in the situation where you work late nights and weekends to fulfill your own expectations, run the recovery protocol of reviewing your tools+schedule+goals. Write it down and address each point one by one. Alter your planning techniques and the tools you use. Adapt, settle, repeat if needed, until you are on the peak of your performance again.
And never ever stop.
Retrieving Thoughts 