Project Jam #5☕ - A Manager's Job Has No Edges Unless You Draw Them
Alex Ponomarev - Thriving In Engineering
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
Welcome to a very special edition of The Long Missing Sow.
Today, we have an article by Alex Ponomarev, who is the author of Thriving In Engineering . His articles are pragmatic, with real-world cases above any non-working theory. Alex has decades of experience in engineering leadership and is the very special guest for today’s Project Jam.
While brainstorming topics for this collaboration with Alex, we realized that stress management doesn’t get the honest attention it deserves. Although there is plenty of literature on the subject, stress remains a major “breaking point” for both strategies and careers.
It is often treated as a taboo subject and rarely discussed openly. For today’s Jam, Alex shares his unique views, with practical tips, setting up boundaries, understanding your own pace, and how to manage the invisible work.
It has been a wild ride since I published the first article on the SoW. Exchanging views with you and hearing feedback on how these articles have been useful is what drives my motivation to write. Leave a comment, subscribe to the SoW, and be part of the community.
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Someone walks into your office with a problem. They ask for guidance, they explain the situation, you talk it through. And somehow, when they walk out, that problem is sitting on your shoulder instead of theirs.
It’s an idea I’ve come back to for years from a piece called “Who’s got the monkey?” by William Oncken and Donald Wass. And it’s one I share with many new managers.
The monkey is whatever task or problem someone is carrying, and it’s surprisingly easy for those monkeys to end up with you. Not through one big handoff, but through dozens of small ones, none of which felt like a big deal at the time.
You take on someone’s monkey because you have the energy to handle it and they don’t, and you’re trying to be helpful. Then the next monkey arrives. And the next. Before long you’re running a small zoo while your own work piles up in the corner.
In most companies, “manager” is an abstract role. It doesn’t really matter what kind: engineering manager, product manager, project manager, or anything else. A manager is someone who’s responsible for the result, and to get to the result you always have to do a lot of additional things that aren’t written anywhere.
Stakeholder issues
Scope that won’t sit still
A team member who isn’t getting on with the others
The follow-ups, the chasing, the small things nobody assigned but that someone has to do or else nothing moves. That’s where most of your time and energy actually go, and it’s where most of your stress comes from.
None of this is in your job description, and none of it is going away. The question is whether you let it expand without limit, or whether you draw a line around it.
Start by writing down what you actually do
The first move is to make all of this visible to yourself.
Before you can have any useful conversation about the load you’re carrying, you need to actually see it. Not what’s on your calendar, not what’s in your job description, but what you spent your week on. The real list.
Sit down at the end of a normal week or end of day and write it out. You’ll see two things.
First, how much of your week went on things nobody formally asked you to do, that just appeared and that you handled because you were the one with the bandwidth. Second, how much of what was actually in your plan got pushed aside to make room for that invisible work.
That gap is the conversation you need to have. Without the list, you don’t have a conversation, you just have a vague sense that you’re stretched, and that gets heard as complaining. With the list, you have a description of your reality.
The conversation most managers are avoiding
If your role is going to have edges, you have to draw them, and you have to do it in conversation with the person you report to. Not as a complaint about workload, but as a clear-eyed look at what’s actually happening.
You need to prepare for this conversation, you have to come with proposals, not problems.
If you walk in and say: “I’m overloaded, I’m stressed,” that’s not constructive. It reads as whining, and it doesn’t lead anywhere useful. A junior contributor can get away with that, but a manager can’t. Because part of being a manager is that you’ve already thought about the situation before you bring it up.
So, use your list. Say something like: “Here’s what I’m actually spending my time on. Here’s what’s getting pushed aside as a result. Let’s figure out where my zone of responsibility is and where it isn’t, and what we change.” That’s a conversation any reasonable manager will engage with, because it makes their job easier too.
Now, you have to expect a particular response, because it’s the response you’ll get most of the time. Your boss will say something like: “Well, that’s how it works in our team. That’s the role. Those are the people.” It will sound like the end of the conversation, but it isn’t.
The next move is to name the tradeoffs. What you say is: “Fine. But I have all of this to do, and my time is limited. I can’t do all of it at the same time. I have to choose. So if you want me to keep running this side of things, I won’t be able to do that. You choose what drops.”
You’re not refusing, you’re not making a fight. You’re just being honest that more was dumped on you than is possible to do, and you’re asking the person above you to make the call about what gets traded.
Sometimes they’ll choose. Sometimes they’ll say everything is equally important and nothing can drop. That’s also useful information, because it tells you the expectations aren’t realistic, and now you have to decide what to do with that.
Maybe you prioritise on your own and accept that some things will be done less well. Maybe you start looking for backup options. Maybe you decide the team isn’t a fit for you. All of those are valid responses. What isn’t valid is to keep absorbing silently and hope the load lightens on its own. It won’t.
Nobody is a mind reader
This is the part most find hardest, because it feels uncomfortable. You have to communicate your boundaries explicitly. Out loud and to the people who keep handing you work.
The instinct is to assume people should know better. They should see how much you’re carrying, they should notice when they’re piling on, and they should adjust without being told. None of that happens, and it doesn’t happen because the people around you aren’t bad. They’re just overloaded themselves, focused on their own things, and they’ll keep handing you work until you tell them not to.
It’s like the oxygen mask rule on a plane. You put on your own mask first, not because you’re being selfish but because if you don’t, you’re no use to anyone. The same logic applies here. If you don’t draw your own boundaries, you can’t actually help your team or your stakeholders or your boss, because you’ll be too depleted to do any of it well.
There’s a trap to watch for. In some teams, taking on extra work means you’ve quietly inherited it forever. You picked it up once, so now it’s yours, with no trade and no acknowledgment. In other teams, taking on extra work is genuinely valued and there’s a real exchange in return.
Know which kind of team you’re in. If you keep absorbing work in a team that doesn’t trade anything back, you’ll burn out, and there won’t be much sympathy when you do.
Some weeks are all out, some aren’t
I want to push back on one thing the standard advice gets wrong, which is the idea that there’s a single sustainable pace and you should hit it consistently every week. That’s not how this job works.
Sometimes I work more hours per week because I have a lot going on or because I’m excited about a project. Other times I work the minimum. It’s not about the number of hours, it’s about how I feel and whether I’m depleting reserves I won’t be able to refill.
Energy not time is the real measure. Not whether you’re working hard this week, but whether you can recover by the end of it. If you have a peak, that’s normal. If you have a few weeks of intensity followed by a calmer stretch, that’s also normal. That’s actually how the work tends to come. What’s not sustainable is a constant peak with no troughs.
So pay attention to what comes after the hard weeks.
If you spend a Saturday recovering and then you’re fine on Monday, you’re in the green zone. If you spend a whole weekend wrecked and have nothing left for anything in your life outside work, that’s a diagnosis. That’s a signal that the load shape isn’t sustainable, and it belongs in the same conversation with your boss about what changes.
The standard advice misses the real skill
A lot of conventional advice about overload is technically correct and practically useless:
Manage your time better
Set boundaries
Build a system
Be more disciplined.
All true, but none of it works on its own. Because the underlying problem isn’t that you’re managing your time badly. The problem is that the role itself doesn’t have edges, and no amount of personal discipline will make an impossible workload possible.
The real skill of senior management isn’t doing more. It’s separating what you have to do from what needs to be done from what someone else is trying to make your problem.
It’s about not silently inheriting other people’s monkeys. It’s about requiring the people who hand you things to prepare them properly first, so you can decide quickly. It’s about helping colleagues when you have room and saying no when you don’t, and being clear about which is which.
It’s a practice you have to rebuild every week, because the load of our work is unpredictable and changes.
The short version
The role doesn’t have edges unless you draw them. Nobody upstream is going to draw them for you, because nobody upstream has a reason to. If you don’t, the role will keep expanding until it breaks you.
Here’s what to do:
See the invisible work first: Write down what you actually spent your week on, not what was on your calendar. The gap between the two is where the stress is hiding.
Have the conversation with your manager: Bring the list. Don’t complain, propose trade-offs. When you hear “that’s just how it works here,” say “fine, but you choose what drops.”
Speak up about boundaries out loud: People aren’t malicious, they’re overloaded too and not mind readers. They’ll keep handing you work until you tell them not to.
Know what kind of team you’re in: Some teams trade something back when you take on extra. Some don’t. Calibrate accordingly.
Watch the recovery, not the hours: Some weeks will be all out. That’s fine. What matters is whether you can come back from them.
Do the internal work too. Find the recovery that works for you, the practices that keep you steady, the things outside work that take your mind elsewhere. That work is real and it matters. But don’t stop there, because the agreements you have with the people upstream are the other lever, and they’re the one I see most managers leave untouched.
Pull both, and the role becomes something you can live inside for a long time. Pull only one, and you’ll keep wondering why no amount of self-management ever quite seems to be enough.
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Alex & Artur
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