June Q&A: How I Navigate Obstacles

Proactive, Acute, and Reverse [Engineering]

You can listen to an audio version of the free preview portion of this newsletter above. Please note that this is unedited and I’m recording in my home office. You may hear some bird chirps, as the birds are enjoying eating at the bird feeder outside.

Two dirt paths diverging in a green forest by Jens Lelie from Unsplash.

Dear Dr. Kate,

I attended one of your previous workshops where you talked about productivity pitfalls and how to navigate them with proactive plans and acute actions. This was super helpful for me! I’ve started to predict roadblocks so I can create a plan that will help me stay away from them. Would you be willing to share examples of how you use proactive plans and acute actions in your own life? Thanks!

What a fun question!

I developed the approach for proactive plans and acute actions a couple years ago when a company hired me to help their employees develop team norms for setting and holding boundaries around availability while working remotely. While its initial use was for a corporate environment, I edited it to make it effective for academic and creative audiences, too (like the workshop you attended).

Here’s a quick summary of the approach for those who might not be aware.

Everyone has patterns of behavior when it comes to our productivity. When we reflect on our previous experiences with obstacles and brainstorm potential obstacles we might run into with a current or upcoming project, we’re able to identify patterns. These repeated experiences might be due to our personal skillsets, the teams we work with, any restrictions we encounter, our levels of personal resources, or something else. The goal is to review our experiences without judgment so we can create proactive plans now to make an obstacle easier or to avoid it entirely. Because some obstacles are unavoidable, we can also generate a list of actions we can take in real time if we encounter a pitfall or obstacle in the future.