When things get challenging or stressful, we attempt to reduce our anxiety by doing things (sometimes anything). By doing things we feel like we are making progress. However, this doesn’t solve the problem at and can even make it worse.
This is an important habit to interrupt because it’s ineffective—the real problem still exists no matter how busy you are. For leaders, it’s important to be able to sit with this discomfort and find a solution rather than try to mitigate with activity if only to make yourself feel better.
See also:
- This is form of status quo preserving behavior because the flurry of activity is unlikely to address your problem and therefore preserve it
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With so much emphasis on productivity these days, an underappreciated problem is work avoidance—not doing what you should be doing because you are doing something else. This is particularly sinister because there is often too much work to do in any given day and we reduce anxiety with activity.