Seems like a good thing for managers to understand as well, because different employees handle it differently. Some employees hide their stress and do everythi

Seems like a good thing for managers to understand as well, because different employees handle it differently. Some employees hide their stress and do everything until they break down. Some employees don't stress, still do everything, but do a rushed and shitty job of it. Some employees do what they can and silently drop everything else on the floor. Managers tend to think that if they're chill and don't pressure people, then the people under them won't have the freak out stress breakdowns. Then they're surprised. Like, where did that come from? Everybody else is fine. Managers think the whole team will follow their vibe and their example, but that's not how people work. This is especially easy to miss with remote work. You can have two people on the same team, one calmly working exactly forty hour weeks, fully aware that things are going to shit, and the other working 80 hour weeks and laying awake at night worrying that they're going to be fired. Managers have to be aware of that and proactively find out how people are handling the workload. For my part, I do my best to understand what I should let die. Wiki pages (or Notion docs)? Give me a break. Nobody reads them. Ten months from now somebody is going to need that info, and I (or whoever has the up-to-date info) will write it up for them and even give them a personal walk-through, in a fraction of the time it would have taken to maintain those docs through the months when nobody was reading them. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but it works for 95% of the docs I've ever been asked to maintain, and the exceptions are things that obviously should not be in a wiki or Notion (release notes, dashboard-y type stuff that you can get from a database query, etc.) And I consistently let my manager know what parts of my "job" aren't getting done. I used to be afraid of telling them, but they understand, and they're grateful that I keep them in the loop, so they're aware and so they can correct me when they don't agree with my decisions. Not just the best managers are cool with this, but even the not-so-great managers. I've only had maybe one manager who was so shitty he couldn't deal with it. Everybody is happy that they're hearing it now and not getting taken by surprise later. It serves as a reminder for them, too, because they're fallible and often forget that certain things don't happen unless somebody has time to do them. They're also often unaware of the productivity cost of missing helper scripts, minor build and CI issues, and things like that, and if they're reminded they sometimes know of a person who needs a task and is good at figuring that stuff out. And you know what's funny? This is the one part of the job that super arrogant rock star programmers are actually good at. They love to tell you about the stuff they don't have time for because of the super important work they're doing. So, in this one case, act like a rock star and tell your manager exactly what stuff you ignored this week because it didn't seem important enough to be worth your time.