Totally in the weeds these days. Alas, only figuratively for now.

This week, I'm only working 5 days... Though 2 of them were around 12 hours... The past 2 weeks I worked 6 days. Each. I'm supposed to work 4....

It's not just that we have a product release coming up. One of my coworkers went on vacation, fainted, ended up with a major concussion... and we're not sure when he'll be back. His tasks--which are the bottleneck at this stage of the project anyway--ended up on my desk. 75%-80% of it I know pretty well, but the rest put me so far out of my comfort zone I'm still kind of reeling...

I was venting about how stressed I was to someone else at work. She agreed that it must be tough, and then pointed out that it was still worse for the coworker who is still out on sick leave....

She didn't say it as if she wanted to say something profound, but that one remark stuck with me. Helped me put stuff in perspective, ya know? Helped me shift from "poor me" mode to "just do it" mode. So the other day I sent her a quick email to let her know how much her comment was helping me. She wrote back that it made her day--she also has been under a lot of stress lately, and hearing something positive really helped.

So here's my challenge to you all: send a quick thank you to someone who's helped you in some way--especially if they probably didn't know that what they were saying or doing was going to make such a big impact.