Continual Project Management: Life After Corporate America

Michael is a technical project/program management manager.

  Career Development  

“I am slowly dying every day I am here.”

It was February 2023, and that was the thought that kept going through my head. My past six years had been spent living in Airbnbs and traveling the world on my motorcycle while working remotely as a senior project manager.

Although on paper my career looked fulfilling and successful, underneath the veneer I was starting to feel an emptiness growing. Over time, my motivation at work began to fade. This eventually crept into other aspects of my life.

It was time for me to make a drastic change, more than just a slight adjustment here or there. I wanted to take all the pieces of the game on the table and forcefully swipe them all on the floor, and then flip the entire table over.

There wasn’t a specific item that could be blamed for my feeling this way. As project managers, we have the ability to self-assess and determine root-cause analysis to resolve these types of problems, but even using those tools the answer to this problem continued to elude me.

Something within me was out of tune. It could be my age, it could be the large size of the company I worked for, it could have been any number of things. But my work life was at the point where feeling empty and unfulfilled had become a regular occurrence, and I wasn’t quite sure how to go about resolving this feeling.

As with many large companies, …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.