At work and thinking about ‘thought stoppers’ and the challenge of reactive vs. proactive thinking. Reactive: “I can’t do that, we need to cut it.” Proactive: “we can get close to the goal by doing this other thing, which is less effort, and gets us 90% of the way there.” Thought stoppers: “We’re too busy”. “The team is booked”. Those are the kinds of things that can be absolutely true, but they also result in the kind of churn and time-wasting everyone complains about. Where you spend more time considering who can be tapped to do something than it would take to simply do the thing.