Just don’t
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Just don’t
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Re: Just don’t
#2> you’re not inside their head and don’t understand what they see and feel.
This is also information worth communicating. The newcomer to the project is expected to be ignorant of the problems and the mental set of those addressing them, in any reasonable setting. To confess your own ignorance and declare your readiness to learn in that situation is better, I think, than to pretend knowledge you do not actually posses.
"Just do this?" questions are re-phrasable as "Would this work?" questions, if the language environment is prickly.
Re: Just don’t
#3This is great advice.
Anecdotally, I've been having pretty bad anxiety this year from work that I feel should be easy but turns out to have many unexpected wrinkles. In retrospect, it seems like there may have been a lot of "justs" when discussing early solutions.
I've started to take a step back when approaching problems to better understand potential obstacles, but this was still a pretty big toll on my confidence.
Re: Just don’t
#4I really wish there was a version of "just" and "only", that has the connotation of there is one and only one thing, but not the connotation of that being trivial.
Something that expresses "there is 1 thing and that makes it a big deal!"
Re: Just don’t
#5Rhetorical tricks to reframe problems are annoying to me. More so when I find myself reflexively doing it. For example, calling something simple. Or referring to a desired feature as "making it easy."
I think often you can be specific. Don't push for the team to make a feature easy. Push for the number of steps necessary for something to be reduced. Or to enable undo/redo.
I wish I had an easy exit for the "just" advice here. I don't, sadly. Empathy is the best I can come up with.
Re: Just don’t
#6Related: if someone has a chronic condition, don't drop on them unsolicited medical advice, especially things like "have you tried yoga?", "you just need more sunshine", "you must try my cousin's healing tea!".
You're not their doctor, and they haven't shared all the medical details with you. Your 3-second diagnosis is almost certainly terrible. They've heard it a dozen times already, and it's difficult and tiring to politely decline well-meaning but frustratingly useless advice.
Re: Just don’t
#7I get a lot more mileage out of "have you tried..." than "why don't you just...".
As a recent example, I wrote a system that auto-generates PDF packing slips from an order form, to send to a warehouse for picking and packing.
Yesterday a client told me to "just make it landscape" while I was explaining why "just making it landscape" won't solve the problem of giving the warehouse whitespace to pencil stuff in, because even though "just making it landscape" solves this same problem in Excel, when the client was sending out Excel files as packing slips... the current system is not Excel".
I couldn't find a way to get the client to get from "just make it landscape" to listening to me ask "what is the warehouse actually trying to pencil in?" and "how much space do they need? Are they penciling in notes globally at the top of the document or on a line-item basis next to each SKU?"
To the client I was wasting their time because "just make it landscape".
Needless to say working with this client is challenging on an interpersonal level. The work itself is fun though, and it's improving my EQ handling a client like this.
Re: Just don’t
#8I mentor students on research projects. I think it can be fine to use the word “just” in this context exactly to telegraph that I think a particular task should be easy. Student says, “But what about X?” I might say, “Oh, just do Y.” It’s fine if they feel the tension of me knowing how to do something and thinking it’s easy and them not. The key part is providing a supportive environment so that they know they can ask questions. At this point, it’s on them: they can challenge themselves and try to do Y without any help, or they can ask for more guidance. This is what they call a “teachable moment”.
Learning how to differentiate between when it’s reasonable to ask for more help and when it’s not is an important skill to pick up since there’s a dividing line for basically all roles you might find yourself in.
Re: Just don’t
#9Great article. It's like people assume that you are some free rational actor, instead of being totally shaped by your history (specially childhood).
Re: Just don’t
#10I get a lot more mileage out of "have you tried..." than "why don't you just...". As a recent example, I wrote a system that auto-generates PDF packing slips from an order form, to send to a warehouse for picking and packing. Yesterday a client told me to "just make it landscape" while I was explaining why "just making it landscape" won't solve the problem of giving the warehouse whitespace to pencil stuff in, becaus…
> "have you tried..."
Or: "what have you tried?"