https://paul.copplest.one/blog/do-nothing.html

Paul Copplestone
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# Do nothing

The unreasonable effectiveness of doing nothing.

A typical interaction.

I had a colleague send me a message the other day:

    12:13pm colleague: hi copple

Me: spend 2 minutes pondering how to politely suggest a better method
of asynchonous communication.

    12:15pm me: hi, how can I help?

One minute later

    12:16pm colleague: can i check if stripe integration has been
    removed from xero? cause a client is trying to pay for an invoice
    via credit card but the button is no longer there

Me: do nothing.

    12:28pm colleague: ah no worries - it's sorted already

Why you should do nothing.

I spent my early career as a sysadmin in a company of about 300
people. These interactions were frequent. Being an young upstart I
would jump on them straight away.

Often I would spend hours solving the problem, prioritising it above
what I was previously doing, only to find it wasn't important to
begin with.

The reason people make these requests is that it removes a burden
from the requestor. They have some stress, and they need someone to
offload that stress on. This has nothing to do with the actual
problem and everything to do with the person's peace of mind.

At some point we realise that we aren't paid to be psychologists, we
are paid to solve problems in the order of most important first.

Do less.

Make sure you cut out the signal from the noise. Sometimes the best
course of action is no action at all.

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Last Updated: 2/6/2020, 2:56:03 AM