How to Work with Someone You Can’t Stand and Still Produce Great Work

Specific habits that help you collaborate well even when a colleague deeply irritates you.

A reflection from Contempli — a quiet space for self-discovery and contemplation.

The Person You Didn’t Choose

There’s someone at work — maybe in the next chair, maybe on the other end of a video call — whose presence tightens something in your chest. Perhaps it’s the way they interrupt. The way they take credit. The way they chew. The way they exist in a space you also have to occupy.

Working with someone you can’t stand is one of the most quietly exhausting experiences of professional life. It doesn’t make headlines. It rarely justifies a dramatic exit. But it grinds against you, day after day, consuming energy you’d rather spend elsewhere.

This isn’t about pretending the irritation doesn’t exist. It’s about developing specific, honest habits that let you do meaningful work — even alongside a person who gets under your skin. Not because you owe them warmth you don’t feel, but because you owe yourself the freedom to create something you’re proud of regardless of who’s sitting next to you.

Separate the Work from the Person

The first habit is deceptively simple: learn to evaluate the work independently of the person producing it.

When someone irritates you, a kind of contamination happens. Their ideas start sounding worse because they said them. Their contributions feel less valuable because they came from that person. This is natural — your nervous system is doing what it does — but it’s not accurate.

Try this: when they offer a suggestion, imagine the same words coming from someone you respect deeply. Does the idea still feel weak? Or does it suddenly have merit you couldn’t see through the fog of your frustration?

Practical habit: Before dismissing their input, pause for three seconds. Ask yourself: Am I reacting to the idea, or to the person? You don’t need to answer out loud. You just need to be honest with yourself.

This isn’t about being fair to them — though it is. It’s about being accurate. And accuracy serves your work better than resentment ever will.

Shrink the Surface Area of Contact

You don’t need to become friends. You don’t need to have lunch together, share personal stories, or build rapport beyond what the work requires. One of the most liberating realizations is this: professional collaboration doesn’t require personal connection.

The habit here is intentional boundary-setting — not cold, not hostile, just clear.

• Define the collaboration points. What specifically do you need from each other? Reduce ambiguity. When roles are unclear, friction multiplies.
• Communicate in writing when possible. Email and messages create a buffer that face-to-face interaction doesn’t. They give you time to respond rather than react.
• Keep meetings short and structured. An agenda isn’t bureaucracy — it’s protection. It keeps the interaction focused on outcomes rather than drifting into territory where irritation builds.
• Let silence be acceptable. You don’t have to fill every shared moment with conversation. Quiet coexistence is a valid professional mode.

Shrinking the surface area isn’t avoidance. It’s architecture. You’re designing the collaboration to minimize unnecessary friction while preserving everything the work actually needs.

Name What’s Really Happening Inside You

Here’s where things get deeper, if you’re willing.

Sometimes the person who irritates you most is reflecting something back that you haven’t fully examined. Not always — sometimes people are genuinely difficult — but often enough that it’s worth asking.

What specifically bothers me about them?

Write it down. Be petty if you need to be. No one’s reading this.

Now look at what you’ve written. Is it their confidence that bothers you — and does that touch something about your own self-doubt? Is it their carelessness — and does that remind you of how tightly you hold everything together? Is it their need for attention — and does that mirror a need you’ve learned to suppress?

This isn’t about excusing their behavior. It’s about understanding your intensity of reaction. Two people can find the same colleague mildly annoying. But if your reaction is visceral, disproportionate, consuming — that extra charge is coming from somewhere inside you.

Reflection prompt: If this person changed nothing about themselves, what would I need to shift internally to feel less drained by their presence?

You might not have an answer immediately. That’s fine. The question itself begins to loosen something.

Protect Your Energy with Rituals

When you can’t change the person and you can’t leave the situation, you need recovery practices — small rituals that help you discharge the irritation rather than accumulate it.

These don’t need to be elaborate:

• A transition ritual after interactions. A short walk. Three deep breaths. Washing your hands. Something physical that signals to your body: that’s over, I’m back to myself now.
• A venting practice that has an endpoint. Talk to a trusted friend for five minutes — then stop. Write a furious note — then delete it. Venting without a container becomes rumination, and rumination feeds the very thing you’re trying to release.
• An anchor phrase. Something you silently repeat when irritation spikes: This is temporary. I choose where my attention goes. Their behavior is not my emergency. Find words that genuinely settle you, not ones that feel hollow.
• Celebrate your own professionalism. Quietly acknowledge when you handled a difficult moment with grace. Not because you’re performing — but because recognizing your own capacity builds resilience.

These rituals aren’t about suppressing your feelings. They’re about metabolizing them — letting the frustration move through you rather than calcifying into bitterness.

Choose What You’re Building Over What You’re Enduring

The most powerful habit isn’t about the other person at all. It’s about redirecting your attention toward what you’re creating.

When your focus narrows onto someone’s irritating qualities, your creative energy shrinks. You become reactive rather than generative. The work suffers — not because of them, but because of where you’ve placed your attention.

Ask yourself regularly: What am I trying to build here? What does this project need from me at my best?

When you anchor to purpose — to the quality of work you want your name attached to — the irritating colleague becomes smaller in your field of vision. Not invisible. Not irrelevant. Just… less central.

This is not denial. It’s proportion. They are one element in a larger picture, and you get to choose how much canvas they occupy.

When It’s More Than Irritation

A brief but important note: there’s a difference between someone who irritates you and someone who harms you. If the behavior crosses into bullying, harassment, discrimination, or consistent undermining that affects your wellbeing or career — that requires action beyond internal habits. Trust your own sense of when a line has been crossed.

The Quiet Dignity of Working Well Anyway

Producing great work alongside someone who irritates you is not a small thing. It requires a kind of internal discipline that no one will see or applaud. It asks you to hold your frustration and your standards simultaneously — to refuse the easy path of either explosive conflict or quiet disengagement.

There’s a dignity in this. Not martyrdom — you’re not suffering for suffering’s sake. But there’s something genuinely powerful about knowing that your creative output, your professionalism, and your inner peace don’t depend on everyone around you being pleasant.

What if the most important collaboration skill isn’t chemistry — but the ability to create something meaningful even in its absence?

You don’t have to like everyone you work with. You just have to keep choosing, again and again, to show up as someone whose work reflects their values rather than their frustrations. That choice — quiet, daily, unglamorous — is its own kind of mastery.