walked away from a comfortable saas product role a few months back to do this full time and nobody warned me about the whiplash. at the old job someone else did legal, someone did payments, someone did ops, i just shipped features. now its all me and the hat switching every hour is the thing that wears me down, not the work itself. curious how others who came from a structured job adjusted, or if you just white knuckle it until it feels normal.
the hat switching is the job now, that does not go away, you just get faster at it. what helped me was batching, do all the ops stuff one morning, all the creative another, instead of thrashing between them every hour. the constant switch is the real tax, not the tasks.
batching makes sense, right now i am reactive all day and it is death by a thousand little switches. the old job had the structure imposed on me, here i have to build it myself and i clearly have not yet.
the thing nobody tells you leaving a big company is that the structure was doing a lot of emotional work for you too. no boss means no one validating that you did enough today. you have to decide that yourself and it is weirdly the hardest part.
did this move years ago and never looked back, but kyle is right about the validation thing. i had to learn to close the laptop and call it a day on my own authority. the freedom is real but so is the fact that the work never technically ends.
the validation point hits. i keep working late not because the work needs it but because nothing tells me it is okay to stop. going to try batching plus an actual hard stop and see if the whiplash eases. thanks, genuinely needed to hear this today.