In last Tuesday’s newsletter, I wrote about “Comfort Work”:

We talk about “comfort food” and “comfort viewing” but I’ve never heard anybody talk about “comfort work.”

Comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do.

I know I need to work, but I don’t know what I should be working on, or I can’t work on the thing I should be working on because I’m too tired or depressed or otherwise unmotivated.

Comfort work must be comforting and it must be actual work. This sounds simple, but it’s an odd combination. Comfort work is work I’ve done before that I know I can do, but it still must present enough of a challenge to be considered actual work.

Readers filled the comments with their own forms of comfort work. Read more in the newsletter.