I had a cold this week.

Not a bad one. The kind I would normally push through, take something for the headache, show up anyway, get through the day.

This time I didn’t go in. And that surprised me a little.

It wasn’t really the cold. It was the thought of everything around the day: the alarm clock, the commute, sitting down to another day where everything is urgent, where every ticket matters because timelines and budgets sit behind it.

Even when the work itself is often small, routine, or repetitive.

Somewhere between the alarm clock and the commute, my body just didn’t want to do it.

Not in a dramatic way. Just a quiet kind of refusal.

Everything Is Urgent

There’s a particular pressure in software development that’s hard to name precisely.

Every ticket has a priority. Every deadline matters. Every bug connects to something else that depends on it. The backlog is always full, the sprint is always tight, and somewhere someone is waiting on something.

Even when people try to keep the pressure low, the work itself carries it. Budgets depend on delivery. Systems need to stay running. A small problem in the wrong place can quickly become a bigger one.

It creates a constant low hum of urgency.

A colleague mentioned burnout this week. I don’t know if that’s what this is. I’m not sure I’ve earned that word yet, or whether that’s even the right way to think about it.

What I do know is this: at some point I started feeling the weight of the urgency without always feeling the meaning behind it.

In reality, what we build matters, but it rarely carries the kind of stakes where someone’s life depends on it. A system being down for an hour is frustrating and expensive, but it isn’t a catastrophe.

And yet the work can still feel like it should never stop, like every problem needs to be solved immediately.

What A Cold Reveals

A light cold shouldn’t normally be enough to stay home. Rationally, I know that.

But maybe my body disagreed. Or maybe some part of me just needed a reason to stop.

The strange part is how quickly the routine came back into focus. Wake up early. Commute. Work. Commute again. Eat. Shower. Sleep.

And repeat.

I don’t have a neat conclusion. I’m not going to say I’ve figured out balance or that I’m suddenly taking better care of myself.

I just noticed something this week.

Tomorrow the urgency will still be there. So will the backlog. Nothing will have collapsed.

It will keep going without me. It always does.

Maybe that’s worth remembering.