Introduction

Many of us dream of a situation where we can work at a sustainable pace, having enough time for everything and being able to comfortably do our job. But it doesn’t work. I’ll tell you why.

The Comfort Trap

When you get too comfortable and you have much (time) space for work, you start to distract yourself. You usually say to yourself: “I can dig it a little bit deeper. It would be worth finding out more about it. I should look around for other sources of information. It is necessary to expand my network so I’ll take a look at LinkedIn.” It sounds quite reasonable at first. You start to read about subject A, then you come across another interesting subject B, which turns out to be important, and then subject C appears. And so on. After a while (sometimes a few days, weeks, or even years), you are doing something completely different.

And then, disappointment appears. You start feeling in your gut that you are not doing what you wanted to do. Disappointment is a kind of emotion that aims to move you a little bit so that you wouldn’t feel too comfortable. Wow! What a contradiction because you wanted to feel comfortable.

You can imagine such an internal dialogue:

“Strange. Why this disappointment? I wanted to feel comfortable.”

“But you know you are off course. It’s time to wake up. It’s not fulfilling in the long term. And you might lose your comfort in a while.”

Sometimes also, guilt appears. You wanted comfort, you had gained it, and then started to lose it. It is not pleasant, but it forces you to do something. It is a kind of warning.

Finding a New Path

So the question is: “How can I consciously do it in a different way? How can I develop a different kind of warning system?” There’s good news for you. There is such a system already. The main thing is that you want to be sure that you are on course, or sometimes you might want to change the course a little bit but do it with full awareness. And you want to see the progress of your work; this is what gives you a sense of purpose and meaning. In other words, you want to be strongly focused.

To achieve these goals, you may use a Kanban board and retrospectives. The Kanban board gives you the ability to see what you are doing, see the progress you make, and roughly plan what you want to do. It keeps your focus sharp because it is physical. Our minds distract when they lack something they can stick to. Retrospectives help you verify your course and modify it if necessary.

The story described above applies also to teams. It’s quite common that teams after weeks of very hard overtime work tend to do their job in a very lazy manner for many weeks, which is not good for anybody in the long term. Such kind of work is simply not satisfying.

Conclusion

So, stay focused, feel fulfilled.

P.S. This is the first time I write in English and this is the direction I decided to choose for my later writings. Now it is an experimental activity, and I am sorry for language mistakes in advance. Have fun!

(Text translated and moved from original old blog automatically by AI. May contain inaccuracies.)