Managing Chaos at A New Job

Last week I started a new freelance job. They gave me a new email address, invited me to Slack and Jira, and sat me at my new desk.

Those first few days were glorious– no real email, no Slack notifications or Jira tickets assigned to me and my desk had nothing on it– just my laptop. I’m about 10 days into the job now, and yesterday, for the first time, I started feeling a bit overwhelmed.

They’re adding me to google docs and Airtable charts, 2 new slack channels and I have to upload files to Zeplin and share Sketch documents that have to be saved in Abstract.

There are 7 new slack channels I’m invited to and I forgot the names of 3 people on my team.

Our work is always battling chaos.

Chaos at work is the disorganization of information and pattern-less structure which leads to feeling overwhelmed, lost and helpless.

Chaos is always a threat.

The bigger a company gets, the longer an employee works at the company, the more systems and people and offices are in place, the more potential that chaos has to take over.

But there is some good news.

Although most of us are not mathematicians or physicists, we do deal with chaos theory on a daily basis. Chaos is a branch of math that focuses on dynamical, chaotic, and seemingly random systems. And chaos theory is the idea that a small change in the initial state has huge consequences in the later state. (“The Butterfly Effect” is related to this idea.)

In math, a tiny rounding error in an early chaotic system may affect a drastically different outcome down the line. And at work, it can work the same way.

In the initial stage (let’s say the first few weeks on a new job, or after hiring a new team member), if you can set clear boundaries with your time and attention, you can set yourself up to battle the chaos better. If you set a manageable pace for yourself and let people know that on Tuesdays you have a commitment after work, it’s easier to keep those expectations over time than trying to course-correct later on.

Chaos theory states that in a chaotic system, a small change to an initial state has huge consequences in the future. Work is a chaotic system.

See what a difference it makes by creating a small change at a fresh start date (a monday, the start of a month, the day after a holiday, new year, birthday, etc)

Share your observations in the comments.

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