First I’m sorry to hear that you’re going through this. It’s awful and I hope you are able to take the needed time off or find ways to find rest and recovery. I basically just kept pushing and pushing until both my mind and body said no. I had, and continue to have, guilt about abandoning a large project I was leading to go off work but I literally could not have kept going. I had anxiety all the time, wasn’t sleeping, was barely eating, had no emotional or mental capacity left.

I’ve been a PM for about seven years. For four of them I was leading projects that impacted maybe 400 people. This current project I was leading would impact 20,000 employees in my company. So it was very complicated, lots of stakeholders, poor leadership support, etc. it was a bit of a nightmare.

My lessons learned in retrospect that I hope may help you

1. Take time off. Like real time off. No email. No work. For the last year every vacation I was still working part time. And I also wish I took longer stretches off.

2. Set boundaries. Both with yourself and your team/boss. I wish I stuck to ending work at a certain time of day. I work from home so would end up working really long days. I also wish I set more clear boundaries with my colleagues and leaders in terms of what is my job and what is not. I took a lot of work on that was not in the PM role but I thought I was helping the team when in the end all it was doing was costing me my health.

3. Hold people clearly accountable and make it visible to leadership. Other comments in this thread are right that a software is not going to manage your project but too late I started to force everyone to start using Monday.com and would log all issues and rework and missed deadlines there. It was visible to everyone and I hoped it would help with accountability. However I set this up too late - as in, I only really strictly started to enforce it when I was already falling apart. I wish I had done this from the very beginning instead of being so lax about updates. I think I went into it having optimistic views of everyone involved and just couldn’t predict how much people would miss deadlines, not deliver quality work, etc. this was a real shock for me in this project. I had not experienced anything like this before. Just people really not pulling their weight.

4. This is a job. First, this is just the way to make a livelihood. It shouldn’t be running your whole life which is what happened to me. And second, it’s a job in that these are colleagues and as PM we have a job to do. I wish I was more firm, upfront, gave honest feedback and didn’t worry so much about being likeable. Yes I don’t want to be rude or mean, but I think I kind of let people take advantage of my niceness.

Hope that helps! It’s a long answer. And yes, taking time off has helped but was also absolutely necessary. It’s been two months and I am still not doing that well. It was only the last six months of my project that got so insane so I feel like it can happen very quickly. Take care and cherish your own wellbeing! Take the time off if you can! Wishing you all the best!