Reminiscing: The Retreat to Comforting Work. §
Highlights §
- Once you start looking for this behavior, it is everywhere, including on your weekly calendar. Snacking isn’t necessarily bad, a certain amount gives you energy to redeploy against more impactful tasks, but you do have to be careful to avoid overindulging. (View Highlight)
- under pressure, most people retreat to their area of highest perceived historical impact, even if it isn’t very relevant to today’s problems. Let’s call this reminiscing. (View Highlight)
- They’d be better served by addressing the cultural or skill-gaps culminating in the reliability problems instead of trying to solve it themselves (View Highlight)
- Each of these examples is tightly ingrained into the person’s identity about why they’re someone successful. You can help them recognize the misalignment with today’s needs, but real progress on this issue depends on their own self-awareness. (View Highlight)
- To catch my own reminiscing, I find I really need to write out my weekly priorities, and look at the ones that keep slipping. Why am I avoiding that work, and is it more important than what I’m doing instead? If a given task slips more than two weeks, then usually I’m avoiding it, and it’s time to figure out where I’m spending time reminiscing. (View Highlight)