I know that everyone is seeing dread as a negative thing. I think that there is also a good side of dread. Occasionally I jump into a project and later I realize that I was not prepared and made some decisions with consequences that were not fully appreciated during execution. Dread functions to keep the project from starting until some later time. As a result, there is time to consider all, or many of the possible paths a project could follow. Usually there are many more paths that lead to bad outcomes and only one or a few that are really good.

For example, in drilling a hole, I can consider the various consequences of the hole veering off in various directions. Some of those consequences are really, really bad. Some are not so bad, or have subsequent fixes that can mediate the consequences of the error. So when it comes time to drill the hole, I want to make sure that there is no veering in the directions with really bad consequences, and if the hole isn’t to be perfect (and holes rarely are in real life), it veers in directions that have low consequences.

Unfortunately, my natural tendency is towards procrastination and dread becomes a useful excuse for not moving forward. The trick to a good project is to keep things moving forward and that requires multitasking the dread on many pieces of the project so that dread is overcome on pieces fast enough to keep everyone busy. The reward, however, is seeing Mahdee coming together in many different ways and knowing that each piece of her is well executed.