Category: Knowledge work

I’ve been told that procrastination can be a symptom of perfectionism; you can’t turn something in until it is perfect. I wish I had known of that excuse when my father first called me on my tendency to put things off. Forty some odd years later I found an answer in ADD, but when I was about twelve my tendency to put off finishing things was a sore spot.

The incident that sticks was the day my father interrupted my working on a model airplane. He asked me to look up the word “procrastination.” Without looking up or skipping a beat, I answered “I’ll do it later.” Let’s just say that my attention was immediately and forcibly redirected to the dictionary on my desk. It’s a word that I’ve known for a long time.

While I was never especially adept at finishing things ahead of time, I did become very practiced at meeting deadlines. About the same time I was so memorably learning the word “procrastination,” my teachers also noted that I was a pretty competent writer. I was nudged into writing for our school paper and yearbook. I was tasked with editing the schools annual literary magazine. In college, I dated a girl who was the editor of the college yearbook and she assigned me quite a few articles when she was on a tight schedule. This pattern repeated itself in my professional work when I began to write consulting reports for clients.

The thread through all of this was my ability to produce a deliverable on deadline. There was a quality threshold to hit but deadlines ruled. The curtain goes up at eight because the show must go on. If the lead is throwing up in a bucket the understudy goes on that night.

If you could meet or exceed the quality gate by the deadline, you became the go to guy. Practice made you better. It also made you faster. “Done” was the metric. I became a carpenter not a cabinetmaker. Similar skill set, different expectations.

I learned my actual carpentry skills building stage sets. Again, the show must go on. You don’t want a set to fall on an actor mid-performance. But no one is going to live in that room when the run is over. The expression you will hear in the shop backstage is “nail it before it rots.”

Forty some odd years ago, I was part of a team that developed a new accounting system that let the State of New York pay its bills. The project took two years and involved over a hundred staff and consultants. One of the early steps in the project mapped all the steps from developing a budget for the Legislature to enact into law to the paperwork for cutting a check to a specific vendor for the paper to put in the copier outside our temporary offices.

My team met with legislators in the Capitol in Albany, analysts in the Budget Office, accountants in places like the State Police, and clerks in their warrens. As we traced the flow of paper we recorded the process on a wall in a large conference room. The final map was six feet high and twenty feet from end to end.

We transferred that map into a smaller version that went to the Graphics Department in our offices in New York City. Commercial artists there set the hand drawn flowchart into small type and printed the final flowchart as a three foot by five foot poster. We printed a hundred or so copies of that poster and delivered the first one to the Director of the Budget Office. The word “Accounting” in the title was spelled with one “C”.

Who knows how many eyes had reviewed how many drafts of this piece of work? How many times had I looked at it? Today, we could update a digital file and move on. Then, we simply moved on. I took what heat flowed from this mistake.

Messiness has been on my mind lately. It’s probably what triggered this memory. At the time, I was probably a lot more embarrassed than I can recall today. You can opt to be sloppy. You can attempt to be a perfectionist. Or you can get on with it. The world persists in being messy regardless of what you think. How do you factor that reality into your approach to work? Over the next few weeks I intend to dive into that particular mess.

I am the eldest of seven baby boomers; born in 1953, my baby sister in 1961. My dad was an engineer who rose to middle management working in the space program for McDonnell Aircraft. I think we made decent money but everything gets smaller when divided by seven. I don’t recall that I had a room of my own until college except for a brief period when I was recovering from a broken leg (not a recommended path to privacy).

Looking back, one thing that amuses me was the advice on good study habits to “find a quiet, organized place for your work.” Never going to happen. Instead, I learned to tune out background noise and chaos. Getting my attention when I am concentrating can be a challenge.

Productivity thinking starts with controlling the environment. You design the assembly line to enable the flow you want. If the environment is not subject to your control, however, then you are forced onto a different path. Your task becomes how to be effective within the constraints of your environment. What can you control to make your work flow more smoothly?

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life came out while I was in college. One of, if not the first, thing I read in pursuit of better personal productivity.

I was in my second year of college. I had been granted what they called “advanced standing”, which meant I was on track to graduate in three rather than four years. This was courtesy of an exceptional high school education and some natural talent for standardized tests. I was also the production stage manager for a theater group’s spring production. This was an original Broadway scale musical comedy. As stage manager, I was responsible for managing all the rehearsals of the cast of 50 odd fellow students. Finally, as part of my financial aid package, I worked part time as a stage carpenter and electrician at McCarter Theater on campus.

To say that the title spoke to me might possibly have been an understatement.

Surely, I could get it all done if I was just a little bit better organized.

I think I actually believed that for many years.

This was the beginning of a love affair with two mistresses. On one side there was the “magic of the theater.” Bringing together sound, light, and movement to create a moment. On the other side, there was the work to organize and coordinate each of those elements so that they were ready when that moment arrived; systems.

Success depends on keeping both of these mistresses happy and in balance. It’s hard to create magic if you’ve forgotten to book the dance studio for rehearsal. On the other hand, no system can help you when the lead has locked themselves in their dressing room thirty minutes before the curtain is set to rise.

The challenge here is that the systems are easy to see and easy to tweak and easy to play with. They can be measured and reported on. So, you can find lots of advice on how to deal with systems.

Figuring out where to push or nudge to make the magic a bit more likely does not yield to systematic attack. Experience and a willingness to reflect on that experience can work over time. So can frank conversations with fellow travelers. There are fellow travelers out there. Your first step is to go look for them and strike up those conversations.