Use the Annoyance
Estimated Completion Time:
15
minutes

INSTRUCTIONS
Pick one thing that bothered you recently. It doesn't matter if it's a big or small annoyance. The only rule is it has to annoy you.
Then answer three questions:
What did I expect to happen?
What actually happened?
What does the difference between what I expected and what happened tell me?
Irritation is an expectation getting violated, which means every annoyance is data about what you expect. Most of the time you have never said the expectation out loud, and this is how you find out what it was.
Example: Long meetings annoy me. The expectation underneath it turned out to be that a meeting should produce a decision, but didn't.
WHAT THIS HELPS
Turns a bad mood into information. Frustration is specific, and specific is where usable ideas come from.
Got it. Thanks for actually doing the exercise.
