Stop Surviving Your Job by Taking Back Control
You don't have to choose between setting boundaries and being productive. Here's how I went from reactive and exhausted to focused and contributing—by flipping my relationship with work itself.
When I transitioned into SRE, I felt like I was drowning. Not in hard problems—in noise. Slack notifications during lunch. Emails at 10pm. Watching senior engineers' calendars, waiting for them to have time to unblock me. I'd sit there spinning my wheels, falling behind on story points, feeling like the work was happening to me instead of the other way around.
Last month I made two moves that sound contradictory but actually saved my sanity: I turned off all team notifications on my phone, and I asked my manager for more work.
Both decisions came from the same realization: I was being passive. And passive is not the same thing as careful or respectful. Passive is just suffering quietly while pretending you're powerless.
The Notification Trap
The mental load was killing me. I wasn't even reading half the messages—they just sat there, humming in the background, taking up capacity I needed for actual focused work. Emails about deploys I wasn't running. Slack threads I wasn't part of. It didn't matter that none of it directly involved me. My brain was still holding it.
So I turned it all off. Completely. Team notifications gone from my phone.
I still check Slack when I'm at my desk. Still respond to things that matter. But I do it on my schedule, during work hours, with intention. Off hours, it's off. And the difference in my mental state? Huge.
The Opposite Move: Ask for More
While I was sitting around waiting for help from overbooked senior engineers, I wasn't learning anything. I was stalled, anxious, and looking at a sprint I couldn't finish.
So I went to my manager and asked for more work.
This wasn't confidence. It was necessity. I needed tasks I could actually own and complete. More stories meant more chances to figure things out, more areas to get familiar with, more ways to show the team I could contribute instead of just taking up a slot and waiting.
The work started flowing. My confidence went up. Not because I suddenly knew everything—I still don't—but because I was moving. I had direction. I had agency.
It's All About Agency
Here's what I realized: these two things are the same move. In both cases, I stopped letting work happen to me. I went from passive and reactive to active and intentional.
Before: controlled by notifications, waiting for help, no momentum.
After: choosing when I work and when I rest. Asking for what I need. Pushing back on noise. Moving forward on my own terms.
This is the difference between surviving a role and actually being in it.
For the first time since the transition, I feel like I'm on track. I'm learning more, faster. Not because the work got easier, but because I'm not wasting energy on things I can't control.
One Thing
If you feel like you have zero control in your job right now, pick one thing. Just one.
Change how you handle notifications. Set a meeting boundary. Ask for a different type of task. Push back on an expectation that doesn't make sense. Communicate what you actually need.
You don't have to choose between your career and your personal time. You don't have to be passive to be a good teammate. And you don't have to survive your job—you can actually be in it.
Start with one thing. Get your agency back. Everything else gets easier from there.