It’s Just Not That Complicated
Jun. 19th, 2023 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI’ve been wrestling with an ongoing collaboration problem, which is one of the collaborators introducing an irrelevant or distracting assertion that there is a better choice than the one or ones currently being contemplated.
If this occurs during bluesky / brainstorming / long range planning, this is actually fine. It is not irrelevant or distracting; it is a plea for more options. The problem occurs when I’m attempting to implement a choice, and someone wants to return to that earlier phase, _usually_ because they have some kind of issue with the price.
Recent examples include: the price of renting a bike at the bike rental place I had made certain was in walking distance of the hotel we would be staying at, the cost of an airport parking reservation vs. car service. I wrote a really long post to generate a script to validate input while also staying on task, because there are very real problems that I run into when I’m doing something that I _thought_ was going to take a few minutes and be easier than telling my son, once again, Not Right Now, but that turned into a half hour research project that is poorly defined and coincides with trying to prepare and eat dinner.
But I don’t really like the script. It’s unwieldy. If I’m going to be dealing with the burden of figuring out how to do something AND paying for it, input from other parties on cost is just irritating. The rental bike issue was resolved without me having to do any rental bike price comparison; I limited my commentary to, “I made sure that was in walking distance, and a kayak rental place too, so that we only need one rental car. Make sure you don’t save money on the rental bike in a way that requires us to rent another car.”
In general, tho, I think the correct response when anyone in this family says, but there’s a cheaper choice, is, “There isn’t a cheaper choice that is as good or better” and carry on without giving it any further thought. I don’t need to research or assess their assertion. It’s just an assertion. Someone in my family made an assertion that I do not give a single fuck about (cost). Acknowledge, deny and move on.
They _might_ eventually come up with a cheaper, better choice, but I’ll deal with that when it happens. I’m uninterested in cheaper and worse and I’m the one paying for everything.
For completeness: cheaper and otherwise equivalent is totally uninteresting to me. If it takes more time to find it, I don’t want it. I saw Good Enough value in what I was about to implement. I am not an optimizer on anything; I’m a satisficer. And I’m _really_ not an optimizer on price.
If this occurs during bluesky / brainstorming / long range planning, this is actually fine. It is not irrelevant or distracting; it is a plea for more options. The problem occurs when I’m attempting to implement a choice, and someone wants to return to that earlier phase, _usually_ because they have some kind of issue with the price.
Recent examples include: the price of renting a bike at the bike rental place I had made certain was in walking distance of the hotel we would be staying at, the cost of an airport parking reservation vs. car service. I wrote a really long post to generate a script to validate input while also staying on task, because there are very real problems that I run into when I’m doing something that I _thought_ was going to take a few minutes and be easier than telling my son, once again, Not Right Now, but that turned into a half hour research project that is poorly defined and coincides with trying to prepare and eat dinner.
But I don’t really like the script. It’s unwieldy. If I’m going to be dealing with the burden of figuring out how to do something AND paying for it, input from other parties on cost is just irritating. The rental bike issue was resolved without me having to do any rental bike price comparison; I limited my commentary to, “I made sure that was in walking distance, and a kayak rental place too, so that we only need one rental car. Make sure you don’t save money on the rental bike in a way that requires us to rent another car.”
In general, tho, I think the correct response when anyone in this family says, but there’s a cheaper choice, is, “There isn’t a cheaper choice that is as good or better” and carry on without giving it any further thought. I don’t need to research or assess their assertion. It’s just an assertion. Someone in my family made an assertion that I do not give a single fuck about (cost). Acknowledge, deny and move on.
They _might_ eventually come up with a cheaper, better choice, but I’ll deal with that when it happens. I’m uninterested in cheaper and worse and I’m the one paying for everything.
For completeness: cheaper and otherwise equivalent is totally uninteresting to me. If it takes more time to find it, I don’t want it. I saw Good Enough value in what I was about to implement. I am not an optimizer on anything; I’m a satisficer. And I’m _really_ not an optimizer on price.