How to communicate about a lack of productivity due to personal issues?

How much should I share about my personal situation with colleagues or management?

This depends heavily on your relationship with your manager and team. There is huge variance within the bounds of a 'professional relationship.' Do you joke around? Do you typically share personal stories? Do you trust them?

If you have a deep enough relationship, I think you can be vulnerable and share the struggle you're going through.

What's the best way to ask for flexibility or support from my team or management

This also depends on your history at the company. I view professional relationships as a type of banking system; have you deposited enough goodwill in the form of reliable delivery and communication in the past? If so, you can be more bold in asking for support. If you're new the company or don't have that level of trust, this will be harder.

Your family and emotional health come first, though, so I wouldn't try to balance the two if that's infeasible. Instead, you can look into taking a leave from work or use something like FMLA.

Any tips for staying productive and maintaining focus on work tasks during personal turmoil?

This is hard and I don't have a great answer. I wonder if you could use some parts of work as an outlet of some sort? Like, you know you can make consistent progress on a task from work, which is likely very different from any kind of task dealing with your family.

See also:

• The Silent Killer Of Too Many Software Engineer Careers: Burnout
• Constantly feeling burnt out - How to deal with it?

As a person who underwent a similar situation where I had personal issues that affected my work performance, I just took a leap of faith. I did a personal leave - with blessings from my manager.

Personal affairs that affect your performance are not easy to overcome and can be a death spiral where you're gonna get more and more stressed. Why balance when you can focus on the problem and solve it?

Is your personal emergency short-term or long-term? If it is long-term, you can do some therapy or recharge yourself by making your work task more fun and engaging by giving it a twist - make it a game with rewards, etc.

if it is short-term, definitely take a break cause you'd be a better teammate when you come back refreshed rather than slowly weigh the team down because they have to help you; this will also affect your performance review.

This is super tricky, wishing you the best of luck with work and life at this time.

A few thoughts are:

• You may be friends/friendly with your manager and peers, but if you are unsure if you should share something or if it might negatively impact your perception asking for a promotion/raise later (not because of fair reasons, but society and human bias) I would recommend saying “I have a personal issue”, “I have a medical issue”, or “Someone in my family has a personal/medical issue” and leaving it at that. Follow up questions can be addressed with a simple, “sorry it’s personal”.
• If this is a 2 week or a 6 month impact on your performance it makes a difference. Are you letting you manager know your current work will be a little late, or do they need to pull in another engineer for the rest of the half. While I recommend vagueness for the reason, I recommend clarity in asking for what you need.
• From personal experience I do find work can be something positive to focus on when life is rough, as long as you’re confident in your projects. That might be another thing to ask for, you’d like first dibs on the clearest tasks you know the most about for a few months. An no on-call or P0s right now. Best case scenario is work is going well and helps provide relief. Worst case scenario health and family come first so stick up for the boundaries you need whether this manager/company are happy about it. Taking breaks, getting sleep, and having compassion on yourself doing a great job in spite of challenges is key.

How much should I share about my personal situation?
I usually only share as much as is reasonable. Definitely don't want to seem like you're looking for an audience, but just communicate effectively to make a point should get you the help you need.

What's the best way to ask for flexibility?
I'd mention something to the team lead and/or manager just to get a sense of where team objectives are and will be moving forward and this gives you a sense of where you can be flexible and ask for help from extended family as needed.

Staying productive and maintaining focus?
This one's a hard one and sometimes I think just making sure you actively talk with therapists and family about the personal stuff as situations develop. I've had issues where I delay getting into therapy and just from my personal experiences, I don't recommend that. Get in as soon as possible and come up with a plan.

How can I ensure I take care of myself?
Make sure to do all the normal things like eat, sleep, & exercise regularly as a minimum. Mindfulness and building up a comprehensive stress management framework is also really useful and helps you better manage issues that come in the future. None of us can control everything, but we can control how we act and respond. Those are probably the best measures for taking care of yourself in a difficult time.

Makes sense. It was during my on-call and I was investigating infra issues. I had leads and just had to just push on. And it came onto that I had to generate a report and could not complete the entire thing. In my 1-1 they excused it and they mentioned XYZ issues in the team might have caused the on-call burden.

This was the time to call out that I had a personal issue that came up. But I did not. I'll think and dry-run a bunch of scenarios and speak to my manager in my next 1-1.

Hello Ryan,

Thank you for your response. All of those points address the questions ringing in my head right now. I still do not feel confident in speaking to my teammates about it.

My skip Manager seems to be reasonably conversational since the beginning and has shown empathy towards my career progression. I am fairly new in the team and my manager is quite good. But I have not yet built the open relationship I wish to.

Glad to hear it was helpful. I think it’s a great sign your manager and skip are empathetic and supportive, it sounds like talking to them has or will go well. And I’m not sure you need to mention something specifically to anyone else on your team. If they have questions ideally your manager should help cover or you can lightly mention you have something personal right now without going into it. It would be unprofessional of them to dig into the amount of work you’re doing or your personal state other than to ask you or flag it to your manager who will just let them know it’s known/handled and all good.

Sorry to hear that you're going through so much - I hope things get better! 🙏

When it comes to oncall, is it possible to skip a shift? Back when I redesigned my team's entire oncall system at Instagram, I allowed engineers to trade shifts with someone later on the schedule when they needed personal time (vacation, sick days, dealing with personal issues). The downside of course is that you need to double up later on, but that's well-worth it as taking proper time off is so important.

If your personal issues are something that can be improved if you put 100% of your focus on it, you should try taking 1-2 weeks off (and make sure that you aren't oncall during this time). There's a great discussion about the logistics of this here: "Is it good to take all your PTO at Google/FAANG companies or will you have issues getting a promotion?"

Any tips for staying productive and maintaining focus on work tasks during personal turmoil?

Easier said than done of course, but my advice is to set up a division between work and life as much as possible. Your goal is that during work time, your brain is 100% focused on work stuff. And during personal time, it's 100% focused on personal stuff. Some tactics here:

1. Work the same hours every day so it's a consistent routine
2. Enjoy your weekends! Stack them with so much time to take care of your loved ones that you can't possible worry about work
3. Go into the office (if possible). Yep, this is one of those weird scenarios where I would push RTO. Going into the office sets up a physical boundary and distinguisher between work and life

More good advice here: "I find myself getting carried away and working late sometimes - How can I have better WLB?"

How can I ensure I'm taking care of my mental and emotional health, so I'm in the best position to perform my work and communicate effectively?

1. Get good sleep
2. Get regular exercise (if you can't go to the gym, go for walks, ideally with friends/family)
3. Follow the prior advice on setting proper work/life boundaries
4. Talk to people. Don't bottle things up
5. Help others. Showing kindness is one of the more wholesome ways to distract yourself from tough realities

Lots more great insight here: "How do you stay on top of everything?"