Take Your Time

There are not infinite resources, and time is one of those resources. Like it or not, there is a fixed amount of time you have to figure out what's going on. If you haven't found these limits yet, you will one day. Your leadership's ideal state is one where they know exactly where you are in your learning journey, exactly the level of complexity you can deal with and exactly how difficult the other problems you are trying to solve right now are, but this usually doesn't happen.

The problem is there is also a nearly infinite number of things that would be nice to accomplish in any environment that relies on scientific or engineering resources. It is often the case, in my experience, that you cannot rely on leadership to buffer you from an excess of assignments, questions, ad-hoc "please take a look at this"s and other distractions and pressures.

If you believe you can do it all you are in for a painful lesson one day. When that day comes, you'll see there is simply no better sentiment than to say to yourself, "I'll get done what I get done, I'm not going to freak out", and take the time you need to do it well and with care at a pace that is appropriate for you. Sometimes things will need to drop off your plate. Sometimes you'll have to be frank about the fact that "I just didn't have time for that" or "I'm still N% of the way through that".

It takes a deliberate effort to avoid answering every DM, email, or ad-hoc "please have a look at this", and to ignore a growing backlog of an unreasonable size to focus wholly and completely on one thing. It's easy to fall into the trap of cutting corners to close tickets.

Sometimes you have to be the voice of reason and set the standard of quality, thoughtfulness and care for your peers.

Take your time. Being overloaded leads to starvation. That’s bad for CPUs and humans.