Often times when moving forward in your career, you will end facing many different projects that can seem overwhelming when you do not have the full grasp on it yet. This can cause people to shutdown due to their sheer lack of motivation after being discouraged over and over. This pattern says to help fight this type of interreference, it is also okay to Retreat Into Competence. This is essentially moving back onto work that you are confident in and able to complete easily. This will allow for you to gain the needed confidence and motivation in order to start working on a harder, lesser known task. However, you can not retreat into competence for too long or the dread of restarting the hard work will outweigh the problem prior.
I find this pattern to speak to me in many ways. Often times I feel myself overextended and worn out from trying to learn a hundred new things at once in order to complete a certain project. When this happens, I tend to get discouraged easily once things start to fall apart. Thankfully, I had realized how useful this pattern is without knowing it existed. When this happens, I will always tend to move back to a smaller easier project to complete before returning. The pride of accomplishment allows for me to get back into grinding on the harder project.
I believe reading this pattern helped to reinforce the idea that returning to something more basic is not always a bad thing. Often times I will feel like I am wasting my time on simpler tasks, so I move to the harder ones but end up accomplishing neither because I lack the motivation for the harder task. From here on out, I plan on using a smaller, more well-known task as a way to kick start my work and allow for my confidence to grow. From there I believe it will end up becoming much easier for me to take on these large-scale tasks while still also being able to feel like I am continuously accomplishing something towards my goal.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Journey Through Technology by krothermich and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.