Someone is waiting for you to leave their work alone
Readtime: 3 minutes
I used to comment on other people's work because it made me feel smart.
I was a Partner, sitting on a leadership team, and a lot of things crossed my desk. I thought reviewing and commenting on them was part of what I was there for. And I did like improving things.
But there was something else running underneath, and it was fairly simple. Adding a comment proved I could see something the other person hadn't.
It looked like helping
The comments were often decent. Things did get better.
Which is why I never asked myself whether it was necessary. I already had a good reason for doing it, and the reason was real. It just wasn't the only one.
Mixed motives are harder to catch than one bad motive. You can point at the useful part and let it be the whole reason.
Most of it was already good enough
Most of the work I was commenting on didn't need improving. It was already good enough for what it had to do.
Not excellent. Good enough. A paper that feeds into a decision most people have already formed a view on. A document two people will read properly and four will skim. Work that needed to be finished and correct, and no better than that.
If you look at something with the intention of improving it, you will find something. There's always a sentence that could be sharper, a number presented more clearly, an argument ordered better.
And finding it feels like proof that you were right to look.
That's what kept it running. I treated my ability to find an improvement as evidence that one was needed. Those are not the same thing, and I never stopped to check which I was dealing with.
The test I could have used was simple. If this went out without me seeing it, would anything bad happen?
Almost always, no. Someone would have made a decision based on a slightly less polished paper, and it would have been the same decision.
Moving something from good enough to marginally better is a very small gain. But I was paying for it with hours of my week, every week, for years.
And I wasn't the only one paying. Every comment I made created work for someone else. They had to read it, work out what I meant, decide whether it was worth pushing back on, make the change, and send it back.
A few minutes of my time became a much larger part of their day. On something that was already fine before I opened it.
There was a subtler cost too, which I didn't think about at the time. When someone senior comments on your work it stops being entirely yours.
I told myself to care less
When I did change it, that was the instruction I gave myself. I had to keep repeating it, because the habit was properly ingrained by then.
It worked. But the words were wrong.
I wasn't caring. Caring would have meant looking at something and asking whether it needed me. What I was doing was involving myself. Calling that ‘care’ is part of why it was so hard to stop.
You can talk yourself out of interfering. It's much harder to talk yourself out of caring.
There's also something I only saw much later. I'd assumed the habit made me look engaged. It's just as likely it made me look like someone who couldn't tell what mattered.
I don't think I was unusual in any of this. Most of the senior people I work with are doing some version of it, and nearly all of them would describe it as diligence.
Somewhere on your team right now, maybe someone is working on something that doesn't need you.
It's probably good enough, and they know it is.
And they're waiting to see whether you'll leave it alone.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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