BAU (Business as Usual) is a phrase my team uses for all the side work that still matters but is not the main quest: admin tasks, helping a user with an issue, responding to something unexpected, or any of the small things that pop up beside the core work we are trying to move forward. When thinking about a theme that would describe my last week, the phrase I’d answer with is:
“BAU, BAU, and more BAU”
Random side work increased the amount of context switching, and that made it harder to focus deeply on the main thing in front of me. What I also noticed was that this was not only true at work. Outside of work, I also felt like I was carrying a lot of background mental admin: worries, loose thoughts, and small things I kept feeling like I needed to hold in my head. The whole week started to feel like BAU in every direction.
What My Week Felt Like
From the outside, nothing was dramatically wrong. My life was relatively stable. However, I felt more stressed, more overwhelmed, and more prone to overthinking. Small deviations compound into a different internal state, and that state changes how I experienced this week.
I noticed this most clearly in the mornings. It was easier than usual to tell myself that another 15 minutes doesn’t hurt after turning off my alarm. But 15 minutes turns into 30 quickly, and then the whole rhythm of the morning changes with it. Instead of getting up and starting the day, I would shut off my alarm, bring my phone back into bed and scroll through LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or my emails and prioritize comfort and instant gratification. That is why I didn’t make it to the gym before work on Wednesday and Thursday. The problem was never those 15 minutes by themselves. It was what they revealed about the state I was already in. The short-term relief was real, but passive scrolling usually made me feel worse afterward, not better. I would get the initial dopamine hit, then end up feeling even more overwhelmed and stressed.
I could feel the same thing at work, just in a different form. Looking at my todo list brought more worry than clarity. Thoughts like am I missing something? or I know I read about this before, but I can’t seem to find it kept surfacing in the background. It was not that nothing was getting done. It was that too many things were happening at once, and not enough of them felt connected. A lot of the stress came from that low-level sense that my attention was being pulled in too many directions.
I kept trying to tell myself that everything would be okay, and rationally I think I knew that. In my head, things would be fine. In the moment, though, that was not how it felt. It’s hard to just flip a switch and feel settled again. Nothing was falling apart, but everything felt a little heavier than it should have.
Showing Up
Despite everything, I am still proud that I stayed engaged with the week instead of withdrawing from it. Socializing with my team, whether that was grabbing a coffee, lunch, or random conversations throughout the day helped me so much. Cooking class (made a banger braised lamb shank with mashed potatoes) was still a bright spot and a reminder that being around a different group of people can change the texture of a week. It is one of the few places where I consistently feel present and light. I went on two runs, still made it to the gym twice even if it was not in the ideal way, and got to cook and share the lamb shanks with my parents. I also have a lot to look forward to next week: catching up with my university friends at their engineering capstone expo, watching the Blue Jays play the Dodgers, seeing The Book of Mormon musical, and potentially getting another opportunity to travel for work in June!
My realization from this week is that our internal state isn’t fully in our control. I’m not sure I can fully explain what caused the sudden stress, worry, and overthinking. I do know that life is so unexpected and we won’t be able to predict things like how we feel, but we can still control whether or not we show up, practice gratitude, and look forward to things in the future.
Stress does not always show up as a crisis. Sometimes it just fragments your attention, makes ordinary things feel heavier, and makes it harder to settle back into yourself. For example, winding down feels easy when I have a full evening at home, but much harder when that flow gets interrupted by plans where I get home later and I have to settle down more quickly. That is usually when I drift toward easier forms of comfort like YouTube or random articles instead of letting myself slow down naturally. I do not have a clean solution to that yet, but I think that is one thing I want to get better at: learning how to wind down even when the day does not end perfectly. What I am still proud of is that even in a week that felt slightly off, I kept showing up.
Interesting Ideas
- Trust at Scale Lessons from Wikipedia: The RBC Disruptors podcast is one of my favourites because John Stackhouse always brings in a wide variety of guests from various industries (episodes are also ~30 minutes!). Perspectives around how trust is implicit, why access to information has led to a decline in trust, and how we can maintain optimistic for humanity is very refreshing to hear.
- Every major economy is trying to ditch Visa & MasterCard: BRICS + EU countries are building their own centrally managed payment rails, but it’s interesting how Visa and Mastercard are both growing with record revenue and profits over the last 10 years despite a shift internationally.
- Toyota Prius | It Survived Haters and Smugness: Make fun of me all you want, but my dream car is a Toyota Prius (will be another week’s blog post haha) but I really do admire Toyota as a company and they value: long term planning (not obsessing over quarterly results), don’t jump on trends (hybrids > EV’s), and the focus on reliability and quality which are all values that I align myself with.