A short defence of doing nothing

A surprising number of problems expire. Not solved — expired. The team reorganises, the customer churns, the deadline moves, and the thing you were losing sleep over turns out to have been a weather system rather than a wall.

The difficulty is that doing nothing looks identical to being asleep. There is no artefact. Nobody thanks you for the meeting you didn’t call or the migration you didn’t start.

Two kinds of waiting

So the discipline is mostly internal: knowing the difference between a problem you are avoiding and a problem you are outlasting. The tell, for me, is whether I can say out loud what would have to be true for the problem to matter. If I can, I’m waiting. If I can’t, I’m hiding.

Neither feels different from the inside on a Tuesday afternoon, which is the whole trouble.

I get it wrong often enough to keep writing it down.