Perspective

I've been reading a novel that describes a workaholic architect who dies of a heart attack in his 50's. His son remembers his father working all the time and striving to meet tight deadlines for very important business buildings. He was designing cities and buildings for the future; such noble and important work.  By the time the son is in his 40's, all but one of this father's buildings had been demolished because they were no longer what was needed.  New buildings were planned and erected.  The son is glad his father didn't live to see the demise of his legacy.


As I was reading, I was struck by the correlation to my work.  I probably have 10 or 15 tasks that should each take weeks or months to do right. I'm told all are high priority, important, and need my attention right now. I also have a few exciting technology options I'd like to research to determine whether they could make a major impact on how we do our work and the quality of our products.  I can't get to the proactive work because I'm constantly chasing tasks with unrealistic deadlines.

One such task is a response to an audit report. I have worked for this employer for 17 years and cannot remember ever having an audit. Fortunately, there was nothing alarming in the audit. Much of it noted a lack of documentation of our practices. A few other things could be done much better if we had a lot more money and more staff. With all this in mind, I offered to respond to the audit by March 3, 2011.  I'm sure you can guess the response I got on that proposed timeline.

I'm not mentioning this task to complain about the audit. I know audits are important and I'm glad we're being held accountable for best practices. I'm just trying to make the point that we inflate the importance and urgency of tasks and get caught up in the rat race of doing one task after another.  If it was unimportant to do for 17 years, why do I have to do it in 2 weeks?

In 30 days, 1 year, or certainly by 5 years, most of these tasks I'll perform with significant effort and urgency will mean virtually nothing. All the rushed ideas put into place today will be replaced by other ideas on another day.  State of the art systems designed and implemented today will be deemed outdated and inadequate just 3 years from now.  Future reorganizations will undo the well thought-out and carefully implemented reorganizations of today.

I know all this sounds like I'm cynical and advocating for doing nothing at all.  If you know me personally, you know neither of those things is me.  I'm about as energized for change and continuous improvement as anyone you'll ever meet. 

I'm just getting some perspective, I think.

And so I ran today instead of working late again.