After a wild first couple of weeks, this one in Prague was a much needed break. No travel, last-minute trips, or sleep-deprived days walking through a European city. Rather a steady rhythm of waking up, going to the office, and acting like a regular person that lives here. A quiet, but still productive week was exactly what I think I needed.
Prague has stopped feeling like a place that I’m visiting and started feeling more like a home base. I know by heart my commute to the office, some favorite lunch spots around it, as well as the supermarket I always stop in at. The gym has also become a part of the routine too, and often gets paired with a grocery run after as an ordinary beginning-of-week activity. I’d like to say I’ve also settled in more at the office, too. I’ve had consistent things to do from the moment I step into the office, and I’ve been spending a lot less energy just trying to keep up. I’ve been able to think about all of the work I am doing rather than just completing it for the sake of getting it done.
Most of my week went into one project that’s been building for a while now. The bulk of it was working through a long list of items one by one, deciding which ones belonged and which didn’t – the kind of task that sounds mechanical until you actually have to do it. Plenty of the cases also sit right on the line of making the cut, which makes a seemingly surface-level task turn into a string of small decisions. By the end of the week, I had sorted through a large batch, flagged the ones my research didn’t necessarily back up, and handed the rest back for my supervisor to look over.
The early days were all about learning the terminology and processes, which has gotten me to understanding things, but without quite seeing the full picture of how it all fits into the company and their projects. A lot of what I do comes down to judgement calls with no clean right answer, and what made that click this week was realizing the call isn’t the hard part anyway – it’s just that it needs to match my bosses’ expectations. Two people could be looking at the case and land in different places, and both with good reasons, but I just have to filter to their preferences.
I’ve navigated it in a pretty simple fashion: just asking. Early on, I tried a ton to make guesses on what my supervisor was asking me to do and quietly running with it, which sometimes led to me building on the wrong assumptions that differed from what I was supposed to do. Everything went smoother when I started just asking, and when I check in now, I keep my questions open and always hand the decisions to him. It has been a ton of “here’s what I’m unsure about, how should I handle it,” which has saved me a ton of time compared to pretending I know how to handle everything. Another thing that has helped is being honest about my own reasoning. If there is a call I decide to make on my own, I have been leaving pathway notes, so my supervisor can guide me in the right direction if he would’ve done it in a different way, instead of restarting the whole thing. It makes the uncertainty a lot more manageable.
I’m actually writing this from an office building in Wroclaw, Poland. I caught a train out of Prague first thing this morning, and I’ll be here a few days for work – there’s another office in the city, so I came up to spend some time with the team here learning a software. It’s the first traveling I’ve done on a weekday rather than a weekend, which makes the trip feel a bit different – less a vacation, more another part of the job. Once the work wraps up on Wednesday though, the weekend will be more personal. I’m heading down to Zakopane in the Polish side of the Tatras to hike for a couple of days before taking an overnight train back to Prague. I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks, and after a stretch of seeing all cities, it’ll be nice to get a taste of nature again.
