Don’t be spooky

Entire weekend was a write off. I was so anxious. And yep. They shut down the unit (but I got to keep my job).

As a result this is forefront in my mind as a manager. One thing that works great is whenever I ask questions about something, anything, I also say “this is on my mind because…” and I find that both calms people and gets me more useful information. Context matters so much.

Oh... Not necessarily. If I heard this I couldn't resist the temptation to guess what the talk would be about. In a work environment normally a lot of things happens at the same time, so any of these may be the topic of the coming discussion. Which one of them? Is this important enough so I should stop doing what I'm doing? Or it may wait for some time? For how long? An hour? A day? A week?

I cannot talk about everyone, maybe I'm not socially competent enough to decide on how long it may wait (could I infer it from the tone used by the manager?), so it is easier to me to drop my recent work and to start talking right now, then to risk showing disrespect or something like this. Or I can go clever and to pretend that I'm busy right now, but to show up to the talk in a half an hour. Probably doing nothing for half an hour because my mind wanders trying to guess what it is about, so I cannot concentrate. Such a delay is not very helpful for the work done, but it helps to not look super awkward, but shuts the question on "how long it may wait".

From the other hand, if I know at least something about the coming talk, I can judge (at least vaguely) on how it is important, how long it can wait. I can shuffle my priorities in a meaningful way without any anxiety that I'm making a mistake now.

All this is a description of my normal reaction, but sometimes I'm stressed a lot, or maybe feel myself not totally healthy, and then I can be really anxious. Without any rational reason.

> In short, if you think someone might want to know something, and they have a reasonable claim on deserving to know

In a short it is easier to give a bit of a context, then to simulate the mind of the others to guess what they might want to know, and what the reasonable claims they can have. It may be just me, but it is hard to simulate properly -- you need to know what they know, what they didn't know but you know, to shuffle all this to prepare a context to a simulation, then to spend some effort on the simulation itself, ... Why to do all these difficult tasks, if you can say instead "I wish to talk with you about X, because I got bits of information X and Y". It would take 0.5-1.5 seconds longer, and no theory of mind needed.

There was a psychological experiment, where experimenter came to a queue to the copier, and tried different strategies to make his copies in a hurry. The key insight is a word "because": you can ask people of anything, but you need to give them a reason, why your claim should be respected. You can give dumb explanations explaining nothing ("please, let me be the first to copy, because I need to hurry"), it is nevertheless a way better than to give no explanation. The position of managers let them to ignore these rules of a common decency (they are so much more important for the company, and they can make your life a misery, and in any case they find some excuse to blame you instead of themselves, like "you must be a team-player and to forgive your teammates for a small mistakes they made in a hurry"... they have power, so just get over this crap), but it doesn't mean that they should do it. Sometimes I think, that they do it to remind everyone about their position in a pecking order. Not consciously, but the pecking order is wired deep inside our brains, it doesn't need consciousness to drive our actions.

I've had good trust with most of my managers but since they'd usually include a few words to indicate what they'd like to talk about, then the rare cases where that context is missing tends to imply that it's something too sensitive to mention over e-mail or chat. That's almost always bad news.

That being said, there's a world of difference between "let's talk when you have 5 minutes" (= let's discuss something small which isn't worth detailing the context right now) and "come to my office on Monday, we need to talk" (= this is important, but I don't want to give you context right now).

"Wanna see somthing cool?" "Lets shoot the shit after this" "Yo, you wanna hang for a minute at 4"