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Comment by golly_ned | Hacker News Reader

My favorite is ignoring or downplaying a problem. 95% of apparent 'problems' are best ignored in favor of solving the worthwhile 5%.

Sometimes this means 'creating' a new problem by pointing to something unconsidered that's 10x more important.

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I do this at work a lot and often the problem goes away because the stakeholders above me couldn't agree on the problem being important enough to solve for a long enough time.

When a problem survives this, usually it's worth solving.

I normally don't write stuff like this but I did not expect 9 upvotes. I expected a karma hit (but I prefer to just write honestly what I think). That's informative, thank you.

What you said isn't controversial. Its very often the case that people fret and worry about things that aren't 'problems' but instead are just 'stuff they don't like'. In the former case, ignoring it will often make it worse. In the latter case, if you wait a bit then people move on to other things to complain about.

Update: the project that we worked on for the past month got pulled and we now have to work on a new project.

I am happy to report I only worked during the meetings and a bit outside of it, and feel totally vindicated by this approach.

That's lesson number one for GP's. Second lesson is to pay attention to correctly catch the remaining 5%. You can get help to solve them later.

Choose your battles.

Yeah, benign neglect is a good response for a wide variety of problems. FWIW, I also call it "the healing power of apathy".

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