This week I reconnected face to face with a long time friend after a gap and marvelled at the skills and experience they have accumulated in the intervening years. They’ve achieved so much I couldn’t have imagined achieving myself – massive respect.
I discovered what demand avoidance is and was able to reflect on my own approaches to procrastination and to consider some fixes. Whether you’ve been diagnosed (or consider yourself) as neurodivergent or not, there’s a wealth of tips and tricks out there that might suit your context. “Don’t think about it, just do it” might not work for every situation but it’s a great technique for breaking a cycle of overthinking paralysis.
It’s easy to get lost in over planning for what might go wrong but this week I was blindsided by not preparing for success! I’ve been working with a few colleagues to devise and run some refresher sessions for engineers around test driven development and good pair coding techniques. We had talked a little about running small session sizes (8 to 10) for max interaction with participants but this is considered an early experiment that might not be popular so I thought no more about it. Within an hour of asking for expressions of interest we had 22 people per session. We are having to pivot on our schedule rapidly to still deliver what we hoped within the intended timeframe.
On the plus side, this is immediate feedback that the support we intend to offer is targeting a perceived need and has a good chance of being appreciated. It’s also reminded me to ask myself “so, what if this goes better than expected?”