2025 Weeknote 19 : Relaxing can be so stressful

May 5 – 11

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, typically focused on work. Learn more about weeknotes here.

I don’t have a ton this week, in part because I’ve been remote-working in a heads-down way that hasn’t allowed for a lot of creative thinking time. Plus we’re getting ready for a big website launch next week and honestly, I’m a little on edge. But hey… I want to be consistent with my weeknotes, so you get the following.

Migraines and me

Decades ago I was working a college summer job that was turning into something bigger. The company—which published a monthly CD-ROM-based “magazine” called Nautilus—wanted me to keep working for them part-time after I went back to school in the fall. I agreed, in part for a little money on the side, but also because I liked being liked—they thought well enough of me and my work to want to keep me around. (“They like me! They really like me!”)

But as the return to college approached, it was dawning on me what this meant—going to school and taking classes, studying, writing papers, the social life, and then the stresses of deadlines from work… it was going to be a lot.

Without knowing what was happening, the stress of was really getting to me. It got bad enough to give me my first visual migraine, freaking me out on my last Friday night at home before going back to school. I ended up in an opthamologist’s office for an emergency visit on Saturday morning.

I’d never had a migraine before. I’d never heard of visual effects connected to a migraine. And I’d certainly never heard you could have a migraine with no headache. So I was freaked out as these shimmering zig-zags appeared out of nowhere, grew, and moved around in my field of vision. I also developed temporary blind spots. It was terrifying.

The doctor, however, was not impressed. He’d seen this many times, as it’s a well-documented form of migraine, and after confirming there was nothing physically wrong, he advised these migraines can be caused by a lot of different factors, but it was most likely stress-induced. I was stunned. Me? I’d been under stress before, right? So I figured I could handle whatever came my way without ill effects.

I went home, reassured medically but resolved I wasn’t going to stress myself to the point of physically breaking down. I would resign my role, giving my employer a month of transition time, but before midterms that fall I was out. “No job is worth this,” I told myself.

I then went many years before getting a visual migraine again. I don’t remember when the next one happened, but it was stress-induced, too. Over 30 years I’ve had a few here and there, but no more than perhaps one a year or even every other year.

But I had two visual migraines, followed by actual headaches, this week. That’s a record for me.

My work and sometimes life has plenty of “stressors,” like anyone else. And they ebb and flow with time. But four stressors combined this week:

• We’re preparing for the May 14 launch of a new semi-countywide website, taking down nearly 30 legacy websites in the process, and tensions are rising across the board. It’s a lot of work for folks on my teams—the culmination of nearly 2 years of effort. Meanwhile, people inclined toward advancing their personal benefit rather than the collective benefit are acting out, while people that should be defending our team against passive-aggressive attacks are instead cheering it on. To some degree this is normal for a high-profile, high-stakes project nearing launch where people are unsure of the political price they might pay. But for me the stress isn’t so much dealing with the bad behavior, it’s being on the outside looking in, watching colleagues that have put so much effort into the project getting treated badly while I have limited power to stop it. (I know… this is all vague, but that’s intentional.) Bottom line, though, is that stresses are high and rising around this effort and I can’t just wave a magic wand and make other people behave better. I thought I left high school decades ago, but I guess not.
• In parallel to the high-stress project deadline, we are also working on 2026 budgets, and the deadlines are hitting this weekend. I’ve been doing budgets in various forms for 20+ years, so it’s not normally a problem. But the convoluted way our organization assembles budgets is record-breakingly bad. And yet I have to drag myself and my team through it, slogging through weird forms and making guesses 18 months into the future where, if we are even a few thousand dollars off in a $20M budget, we will be castigated for sloppiness or even be accused of defrauding taxpayers (which is laughable, but still insulting). The stress isn’t so much in the budgeting itself. The stress is in keeping my mouth shut rather than starting a fight within the organization about how bad this is.
• Meanwhile, we have a cat that’s dying. “Ophelia,” who we adopted 17 years ago (!) in Anchorage, is in the final stages of her life, dealing with kidney failure among other ailments. This is a stressor lots of people know about, and we’ve dealt with it before. But it’s still hard. 17 years is a long time, Ophelia has been a sweet cat, and she doesn’t deserve the indignities visited upon her in these final days. So while I’m thinking about budgets and projects and so on, I’m also thinking about end-of-life matters for a cat, for aging family, and even for myself and my wife. It’s not top of mind every minute, but it’s in the air.
• Finally, there’s just the stress of being away. We booked this remote week + vacation week months ago, and then all these deadlines and events started to line up right in the middle of our plans. In a lot of ways it would be easier to manage these particular stressors from home, from the office, with all my resources at hand and the option to step in and talk to people face-to-face. But here we are, 600 miles away, with bad Internet and the pressure to “relax” hanging over my head while I still have stuff to do that cannot be delayed. Who knew “having fun” could be stressful?

For now, I’m using a rainy Sunday afternoon to catch up, to stay even-keeled enough to avoid more migraines, and figure out a way to thread my way through the coming week.

Longer-term, I’m wondering whether I can keep fixing things up where I am, or it’s going to be virtual (and real) migraines from here to the horizon. Is it time to make changes in my commitments, like I made decades ago?

Quick hits from the week

• I posted a brief essay on some AI news this week on LinkedIn, and reposted a slightly updated version here to my blog: Every AI result is a “hallucination” and I’m tired of acting like it’s not. I sure wish I could wave a wand and get people to stop writing dumb stories about this technology. I suspect people felt the same way at the dawn of the Internet, too.
• I continue to enjoy Will Hampton’s 5-part series on government communications, with this week’s release feeling particularly insightful: Why your messaging isn’t working. This one is about building trust through gathering real-world and honest input from the publics we serve, rather than just broadcasting at them. To me, this will be the skillset that separates the trusted from the untrusted governments out there.
• HBR had a great new podcast come out this week, from the Coaching Real Leaders series: How Do I Get Out of Constant Crisis Mode? I suspect for a lot of #govtech folks this topic might hit home, and the way the host talked the client through a new thinking process and development of some tactics was refreshing. If that title appeals to you and you’re in a leadership role inside an organization that may not yet have a clear strategy for coordinating action, I highly recommend this episode.

And one bit of fun: Skinny mics for the win

Catching up on some blogs this week I stumbled across this gem: Bring Back Those Long-Ass Game Show Mics. Just delightful.

As a kid of the 1970s, those long game show microphones made famous on Match Game and The Price is Right are part of my history, my lore, my mythology. That microphone and those game shows were part of my sick-at-home-from-school world, never to be forgotten. And Match Game, in particular, stands up pretty well all these decades later. Makes me wonder why game shows in the U.S. just can’t compete anymore. We used to do them really well. (RIP Wink Martindale, who died less than a month ago and generated a string of game shows over his career.)

Meanwhile, if you’d like to travel back in time to the mid-1970s, here’s a full 8 hours (!) of Match Game, just for fun (and there are many more on YouTube):

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