I know not everyone follows my LinkedIn profile with rapt attention. That’s OK – I don’t follow your LinkedIn profile very closely, either.

So, you might not know; I’ve moved into a different-but-not-so-different role at Automattic (the folks behind WordPress.com, Woo Commerce, Jetpack, and a heap of other great stuff)

I was previously leading a support team, and have since moved into a role that we call a Data Analyst, on the Marketing team.

If you’re familiar at all with Automattic’s naming policies, both for jobs and teams, yes, this is an outlier in the direction of the mundane in both cases. I went from being a Happiness Engineer on Team Athens (and also technically on Team Redwood) to being a Data Analyst on Customer Activation.

100% consistent with Automattic standard, though, are the many and varied hats that come with this role: at other companies my day to day work could be described as Marketing, Growth Engineering, SEO, SEM, Pay Per Click, Customer Success, Data Science, even a little bit of database architecture. It’s a lot!

(As a sidebar, I think the job duties and title change may make it seem like I’m making a career change or otherwise sort of changing direction – let me assure you, my focus continues to be on building explosive value for our customers. I’m expanding my tool set – not changing my approach.)

Today, was a cognitively demanding day. Working remotely means taking on a lot of responsibility for structure and organization of one’s work – I’m still figuring out how to do that the best way I can, in this new role. It also means being disciplined to push back distractions which are constantly at the ready in any browser window.

Spending hours looking at databases, considering queries, performance, outputs, accuracy – this is work, it’s real work, and it builds fatigue. A day of work, focused, attentive work, can certainly leave me in need of a deep breath and a long walk.

(I personally find it especially hard to think critically and well about SQL, statistics, databases, and so forth, near the end of my work day. It’s like I’m running out of gas.)

What struck me today was how different this kind of fatigue feels, especially compared to the kind of fatigue I’d feel after a tough day leading a team of Happiness Engineers. I’ve reduced them into two distinct types for the title – Emotional and Intellectual – but I’m sure there is some overlap, maybe some days more than others.

Maybe the difference is, in the lead role, the fatigue comes from trying to serve others, trying to hold them and their full personhood in your mind, whereas in this analyst role the fatigue comes from the intensely individual and personal kind of focus it takes to do it well, to take it seriously.

It does feel different to say to my wife, “I had a hard day – I couldn’t get the data types to reconcile the way I wanted,” rather than “I had a hard day – I think I really let some people down.”

Maybe they’re not different. Maybe I’m different.