💀 The Anxiety Retrospective
STOICISM.DESIGN
The Anxiety Retrospective
April 30, 2019
You've made it through another a month. Use this time -- the end of a thing, whether a sprint, a project, a week -- to think back on your moments of high stress in your work. Can you bullet-down each instance where you rushed, you worked late to "get ahead," where you had to decompress, you had a tense meeting, you had a tough code review, you had to bite your tongue, and so on.
With hindsight and brutal honesty, consider:
- was the design better for having been rushed?
- in "getting ahead," did you advantage yourself?
- were your decisions better for having taken a moment to decompress?
- was the meeting tense because it was warranted by the situation, or because someone - you, a colleague - had a bad day?
- was the code review constructive or cruel?
Sometimes, shit really is sufficiently wrong. More than not, I think, there is a positive and insightful pattern to these events: that is, these things aren't worth the tizzy. At scale, anything but calm reaction to stress costs your organization money, quality, or face.
Seeing this pattern in hindsight is useful for identifying these situations in the present. You'll be better able to emotionally disengage from neurotic bullshit so you can ...
craft virtuously.
Your pal,
Michael
Refer virtuously
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