I was watching MasterChef Australia during dinner when one contestant talked about a situation she got herself in that felt all too familiar to me.

You're rushing to meet a deadline, and in that pressure situation, you make a mistake.

Realising the mistake, you try to fix it, but it eats up some of your already limited time, and you make a few more mistakes because your head's not in the right place.

And before you know it, you're getting crushed under a rolling snowball of mistakes that not only hamper your ability to get what you were working on done but cause immense stress.

This is what is called a Snowball Effect.

Small things accumulate, forming this colossal snowball that makes a substantial dent in your life and work.

It's not always bad because small constructive actions can compound to a massively positive effect in your life.

But for now, let's understand how to handle situations where the snowball effect affects us negatively.

Here's a story to illustrate this on a more personal level:

One evening in my early career, I was wrapping up my work and getting ready to leave for a long-weekend holiday with friends when I got a message saying there was an issue with the app I delivered.

It was not a straightforward quick-fix issue, but I had to fix it before I left. So, I started working on it.

An hour passed, and I had yet to find a fix.

I had a flight at night, so I started rushing to put whatever temporary patch I could find that would hold the fort till I was back.

But one mistake led to another, and before I knew the issue got even more complicated than what I started with.

I got so flustered as time passed that I couldn't even think straight.

Realising that there was no way I was going to solve the problem and still be able to catch my flight, I rescheduled my ticket for the following day and went home to try solving the problem overnight.

And it worked. After I reached home, had dinner and had some space to breathe and look at the problem under less stress, I came up with a solution in less than an hour.

And this is what I've found to be the best remedy to the negative aspects of a snowball effect.

Pause, step back, compose yourself and then approach the problem from a different angle.

The longer you stay in that stress zone, the more likely you will make mistakes.

With a pause and some distance, it gets easier to firefight the issues at hand because now you can think clearly.

So:

The next time you find yourself in such a situation, remember to pause and take a moment to relax.

A composed head solves problems better than a frantic one.

Now, onto the rest of this newsletter issue and this week's recommendations:

Apps & Services

Interesting Reads

Videos

You might have heard this story before, but it's a story worth repeating.

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