Babysitting, Firefighting, and Everything in Between: 20+ Years of Project Management and Self-Awareness
- Date:
- Dec 15, 2025
- Length:
- 4 min read
A dance between order and chaos
If you’ve ever been a project manager, you’ll know it’s less about Gantt charts and budgets and more about babysitting grown adults and putting out fires you didn’t start. Honestly, if I had charged overtime pay for every “urgent” task or “critical” issue that landed in my inbox or on my WhatsApp, I’d be retired on a beach somewhere by now.
I’ve been doing this work for more than two decades — project management, content management, with a dash of QA — since the late ’90s when the internet first rolled into South Africa with the grace of a dial-up modem. I even dabbled in HTML and JavaScript back when websites looked like digital ransom notes held together with Comic Sans.
What’s changed? Pretty much everything.
What hasn’t changed? People.
And that, I’ve realised, is where self-awareness sneaks in.
Early in my career, I thought my job was about managing projects. Wrong. It was (and still is) about managing people. Translating “tech-speak” into something the client understands. Acting as the bridge between the artist and the developer, or the business and the resource. It’s equal parts psychologist, translator, and negotiator — with a touch of stand-up comedy to survive the madness.
Self-awareness as an anchor
Over the years, I’ve learned that the people's side of the work is actually the part I love most. Every day, I get to work with a mix of personalities — some inspiring, some challenging, all very human. And while the constant babysitting and firefighting can test your patience, the reward comes when you see someone grow, or a team finally pull together and deliver against the odds.
But here’s the key: to survive (and even thrive), you can’t take any of it too personally. Self-awareness has been my anchor — reminding me that someone else’s bad mood, missed deadline, or defensive reaction isn’t really about me. The Four Agreements book by Don Miguel Ruiz helped me sharpen that awareness: don’t take things personally, don’t make assumptions, be impeccable with your word, and always do your best. Those principles have quietly shaped how I show up in the chaos, and honestly, they’ve saved me from burning out more than once.
Because here’s the truth: no project in history has ever gone exactly according to plan. Pretending otherwise is a one-way ticket to Drama Lama Island. Planning is necessary (of course), but so is accepting that people are human, life is unpredictable, and control is often just a polite illusion.
So, what keeps me going after 20+ years? Self-awareness. Knowing when to push, when to pause, when to laugh it off, and when to walk away before the burnout monster catches up.
In the end, project management — like life — is a dance between order and chaos, with a lot of babysitting and a little firefighting in between.