BREAKING NEWS: Chill Subs' Creator Feels Feelings

How I (try to) manage anxiety while running a startup with a reach of over 60,000 people and 6 team members and also not having a constant place to live

Mariam Chagelishvili

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Welcome back to the “sensitive Karina” column!

If I think about it (and if you read my piece on not submitting to lit mags, you know), a lot of my anxiety comes from the impostor syndrome and thinking too much. The constant stupid fear that I’m not doing enough or not doing the right, smartest thing, that the people I work with must be angry with me for a million reasons, that I suck as a leader, and that tomorrow I’ll google “Chill Subs” and will find an article like “You thought Chill Subs is a great website? Here are 10 reasons why you were wrong and should stop using them right now”

But apart from that, there are very strong objective reasons that come from the uncertainty of not having a constant place to live and not having enough money to support the lifestyle that made me the most alive (=going to a lot of concerts…) I love traveling, but I don’t think I’m the nomad type (though it would have been easier if I could pick places to live lol) I love having a home base too much. I’m also a hoarder and I like to have a place to store useless shit that means something to me. And so not having that puts the extra pressure.

So yeah, it’s intense over here. But I figured instead of just whining, I’m going to share a few things that help me not go insane and weather the storm. Here we go!

1. Learning to say no… (and in my specific case, not releasing website updates at the end of the work day/week)

People pleasing makes me agree to all sorts of things I shouldn’t agree to. Like saying “Yes, sure!” when the team asks me if the new update will be ready by Friday to go in the newsletter.

If it’s ready, everyone will be excited and no one will think I’m working slow or not committed enough or anything. It’ll give me a few days where I’ll be more or less sure that everyone is pleased with me! (until it resets when something new comes along)

[For you Instagram people, I saw a great reel a few days ago] (yes, I’m that person who thinks you hate me if you’re texting with a dot and don’t use emojis)

But…wait for it. It’s a trap. Because here’s what happens:

• I stay out late the whole week trying to finish the update. Don’t do the things I love outside work that energize me and so ultimately turn into an angry tired blob of stiff muscles

• In the end, I’m able to pull it off at 10 pm on Friday, text everyone IT’S READY, LET’S SEND THE NEWSLETTER!

  We send it out, I go to bed, and then on Saturday I wake up to messages from people saying something is broken

• The next few days I’m sad and embarrassed

🤡🤡🤡

So nothing good.

For some reason, it’s hard for me to soak in that there’s no need to have an announcement in every newsletter.

• People won’t unsubscribe if we just say “Hi everyone, this week we just did our best. Hope you’re good, bye!”

• My team won’t say that I let them down. Whenever I’m brave enough to say “No, it won’t be ready, let’s move the release to next week”, everyone agrees and says that they thought about it too, and I have this surprised Pikachu face like “wtf, we could do that?!?!”

• And the website will feel only better as it won’t receive untested updates right before the person responsible for them fucks off into the sunset (bed)

Soo what you can take from it if you’re not releasing website updates: just constantly paying attention to what’s comfortable to you in the moment and learning to say no if it doesn’t. Of course, occasionally the situation might call for some intense sprint, but that shit is not sustainable.

More often than not, you’ll find that people are absolutely fine with it. And if not, well they’re probably assholes.

2. Not checking mail outside of work hours and not being logged in on mobile

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Disclaimer: this really only works for me thanks to two things:

1. I have Ben who can handle more stress than me and notify me when there’s something urgent

2. That first point about not releasing stuff before bed/weekend. If I don’t upload anything to the site before logging off, it’s more likely that everything will be stable while I’m away

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But really, this is a deal breaker for me. Checking email used to be the very first thing I did when I opened my eyes. And so the amount of times I had a horrible start to the day was ridiculous. My whole state for the day depended on whether I got a scary message when I woke up or not.

Those could be:

• “THIS DOESN’T WORK WHY DOESN’T YOUR SITE WORK YOU SUCK”

• “HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THAT PERSON/MAGAZINE DID? DEAL WITH THIS RIGHT NOW!”

• “WHY DID YOU RENAME YOURSELF TO SUB CLUB THIS IS SO CONFUSING”

Wow good morning!

Same thing with evenings. I stopped working, but then the work somehow continued when I received a notification about some noncritical bug and wanted to fix it ASAP. And then it was midnight and I didn’t understand what the fuck happened.

But then two things happened:

1. Once I suddenly got logged out from work mail on mobile. I didn’t realize at first until I noticed that I’ve been feeling better lately (hmmm) So I keep being logged out. It’s especially good when I’m away and don’t have my laptop with me and get some notification and then feel horrible for not being able to act right away. But this is useless. There’s nothing I can do, so I can just spend that time…not worrying.

2. After the vacation in January, I felt super committed to protecting that inner peace so stopped checking mail outside work hours completely. Now I only open email after I have my breakfast, spend time with my morning thoughts, and now sit at the desk.

And, to my surprise, most of the time I discover that the world didn’t end. Wow.

But one of the things I want to do this year is set up more monitoring for the website to be notified on a separate email address whenever some critical stuff happens.

3. Informing the team about what’s going on

I started sending end-of-day updates to our Slack dev channel. The goal is to make it a whole dev team practice, but it helps even if it’s just for my brain

This way I’m letting everyone know the current state of things and reducing the probability of someone asking me “sooo how is it going?” in the middle of the day (that makes me sweat 3000 times and also distracts from work)

Then every Monday we also started sending a list of things we’re aiming to accomplish this week so that everyone knows the goals and also your workload.

4. Spending time with myself

This year I brought back my morning writing routine. I realized I was too tired at the end of the day to do more than mindlessly play guitar or watch TV, and morning writing also worked great for me 3 years ago (and really brought me to sharing my work and also starting Chill Subs)

So now I have breakfast, then set a timer for 1 hour, and write whatever is on my mind (in January I needed to write lyrics for 3 songs, and then this month I want to write more blog posts about stuff I learn while building Chill Subs)

And then when I’m done, I already feel so much better about my day and ready for 8 hours of changing the lit world!

I also finish working at 7 pm (unless I really want to finish something before tomorrow, then it’s 8 but this one is a hard cutoff)

It’s working wonders and helps me feel like my life is not just Chill Subs. It was hard to allow myself this because hey, it’s my company, and “proper startup people” think about their project 24/7, and I also have 5 other people working full-time with me now and it’s a lot of responsibility.

But really, it makes working on Chill Subs so much easier and more fun instead of being something I’m sick of.

5. Not checking the feed on socials

This one came easy to me even before Chill Subs. The only place I’m on is Instagram and I’m mostly watching stories from my friends now and that’s it. Sometimes I go directly to pages of creators I love and check out what they’ve been up to. But scrolling the whole feed is just a horrible experience for me.

I know, I know, networking and blah and blah. But that shit is exhausting and often leads me to question what the hell I’m doing with my life and “oh maybe I should try what this person is doing!” (no I shouldn’t. I’m ME)

I’m a big believer in just making something genuinely cool first. It’s so much easier to promote something cool if you ever want to. Chill Subs basically promotes itself. (ok not really, it’s a constant effort from 6 people and then other people who help these 6 people AND YOU! YOU READING AND TALKING ABOUT US. what I mean is just it’s so much easier because we don’t have to make up bullshit about how good Chill Subs is, kidnap you, and make your whole family signup otherwise we’ll cut your toe off. we ARE good)

A nice Instagram post will make you feel good for like what, 5 minutes? Quality work will make you feel good for a lifetime cause you’ll be proud of what you’re doing and be more confident that other people will love it too.

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Honorable mentions:

• Cats. I mean…

  

• TV shows: my weird brain always thinks I need to do something productive as hell even when I rest, but I’ve finally allowed myself to just watch a show in the evening and sometimes during lunchtime. Cause hell, you need to relax! Although I need to try to get into fiction cause I think it should have a similar effect (I’ve been mostly reading nonfiction and song lyrics all my life)

• Exercising is fantastic but I abandoned it during all the moves and couldn’t get back to it yet. Stretching works for me now though!

• Going to a favorite cafe always helps too. I don’t know, I guess it’s easier to freak out at home haha. But when I’m drinking a nice cup of (decaf) coffee and my favorite music is playing and there are people around, I just feel better and more relaxed.

I love being around people. It’s exhausting for me to interact with them too much, but just sitting near someone who is also working on something or just chatting about life with their friend is good for me.

I also just feel more alive this way rather than living outside the city, barely leaving the house and just constantly being in my own bubble. It all feels like one neverending day where you’re overworked and tired of your own thoughts. So GO OUT

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Bonus: because I’m not alone on this mountain of stress, here are a few words from everyone on how they deal with it:

Ben: Ibuprofen and screaming into a pillow.

Shelby: I take the Instagram app off of my phone on the weekend. Since our socials are my job, it’s impossible to disconnect from work if I leave it on there.

I didn’t want to do this originally because it seemed like a pain in the ass to sign in again each time I re-download - but turns out it signs you back in automatically!

I mark deleting it as my last “to do” on Fridays and re-installing as my first “to do” on Mondays. [This way I’ll actually do it]

Nikita: I stumbled upon a silly quote somewhere on the internet. It looked something like ‘Create work that fulfills you, regardless of whether anyone else sees it’. Which echoes the title of one of my favorite books: ‘Work and Love’ by Tove Jansson. Since overworking is inevitable I’m doing my best to adapt and adopt a mindset that keeps me inspired rather than feel like a Sisyphus (a.k.a. dung beetle).

What else:

1. Exercise every day
2. Read/watch/listen the good stuff
3. Act silly to make my partner laugh
4. No twitter. Ever

Kailey

Stepping away from my desk for at least fifteen minutes. Or if I have more time, leaving the house all together. Taking a drive, a trip to the gym or yoga class or even to grab something at the grocery store. Being in the world and out of my little CS x WOD cave reminds me that my never ending to do list can’t actually grow teeth and swallow me.

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So that’s it! 

I’d love to hear about your anxieties and coping mechanisms too, so go leave that comment.