Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

When I was in college, I was moved by Dr. Judith Rapoport’s classic book on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing. OCD sufferers engage in compulsive rituals like hand-washing as they try to alleviate obsessive thoughts centered on, for instance, germs.

We’ve come to use the term “OCD” flippantly, as in “Don’t touch Dave’s records — he gets OCD about his vinyl collection.” The real McCoy, as you can imagine, is much worse than our glib appropriations of it. This goes likewise for another condition, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OPCD), which sounds similar to OCD but has important differences.

Folks who suffer from OCD and OPCD can’t help themselves — they feel that they must adhere to certain standards of order, cleanliness, or the like.

But the rest of us? My sense — and this is hardly a professional psychological opinion, mind you — is that we subject ourselves to unfruitful rituals and arbitrary standards simply out of habit.

Obsessing over social-media standing

What prompted me to think of this: a few weeks back, I got into a conversation on Twitter with a fellow who expressed his disappointment about people unfollowing him after a certain set of tweets (i.e., messages) that he posted. I couldn’t see why he was so quick to care — and to judge others’ motives — about something that I found so trivial.

The guy, it turns out, has an elaborate tracking setup that alerts him immediately when people start or stop following him, so he believed that he could trace the cause-and-effect relationship between his messages (which were, to be fair, unobjectionable) and the choice of folks to stop following his messages.

I tried to suggest to him that people have many reasons for following or unfollowing someone on Twitter, and that he had so many followers (i.e. thousands of them) that the unconnected choices of half a dozen of them could easily look like a trend when it really wasn’t.

Oh, and one more thing: what’s the point of expressing dissatisfaction — or even feeling it — because a handful of people you don’t even know happen to decide that your messages aren’t quite their preferred flavor?

I use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn regularly, and I know how easy it is to obsess over them, and even to get competitive about how many connections you’ve made, whether people you follow have opted to follow you back, and so on. But when I find myself heading down this path psychologically, I try to stop and ask myself “Wait, what’s the point?”

Obsessing over the time clock

Some years ago, my wife worked in an office run by a manager who was an old pro at creating new things to worry about. Folks had to be at their desks by a very certain time (even though it didn’t really matter) and they had to be out the door at a very certain time (ditto) and they had to keep their office doors open at all times and they had to . . . well, it just went on and on.

The manager had a way of taking the most trivial things and turning them into themes for new daily crusades — crusades that were mostly carried out against all the smart people trying to work hard in that office. If it hadn’t been so pointless, it would have been funny to track the steady exodus of talented people (including my wife) out of that company.

The morals of this story:

• I have enough to worry about in my life without concocting new worries based on my social-media use, or my ascription of motives to my fellow Austin drivers, or whatever-the-heck else I might choose to worry about.
• Businesses usually have enough to worry about without also worrying about precise clock-ins, narrow dress codes, meaningless “mandatory” behaviors, and so on.

So, folks, please share:

What are some of the worries you’ve seen individuals or businesses create for themselves?

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(Photo by Todd Baker.)

Perusing the virtual newsstand.

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Dan Markovitz of TimeBack Management makes some excellent points in this post:

How do you change lousy work habits?

I’ve pointed before to the article “Infomania,” which lays out in detail the real, honest-to-goodness, cash-money business costs of e-mail overload and constant interruptions. The intellectual framework is there: we know that bad habits around e-mail and meetings and interruptions cost money. Yet still we don’t change.

As Dan rightly points out, we have to get beyond the logical or intellectual reasons why this is true, and start changing the societal habits — the psychological frames — that we put around these habits.

Think of all the unhealthy social practices — whether something as historically serious as blatant racism or as incidental as spitting in public places — that we now regard as uncouth, unsociable, uncivilized. Organizations that want to improve their performance need to build up some of the same stigmas around unhealthy information practices.

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Social-media P.R. pioneer Brian Solis offers an interesting conversation-starter with this piece:

The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution

There are terms here I would alter (”peoplenomics”? yecch), but I like Brian’s emphasis that not everything is changing, and his observation that much of the overheated talk about “social media” is coming from folks inside the social-media echo chamber; for most folks, social media is just “media” that’s taking on new forms and enabling new, more highly distributed, means of conversation. If you’re interested in what Brian says here, you might also like my earlier take in a related vein, “Western Union and record labels.”

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Joe Romm at the Climate Progress blog stumps for the power of energy efficiency:

Energy efficiency, Part 2: The limitless resource

People who have little experience with what serious energy efficiency investments can do for a company or a state [...] think it is a one-shot resource wherein you pick the low hanging fruit. In fact, fruit grow back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more and more people.

Particularly compelling is Joe’s assessment of the energy-efficiency actions of Dow Chemical in the 1980s under manager Ken Nelson. You might think that a big, smart, capital-intensive company like Dow would be all over energy efficiency from the get-go, but it’s just not so. My own take on this is that energy was so cheap for so long — and our cultural practices around energy use were so entrenched — that even many big companies didn’t find it worthwhile to pursue efficiency.

The comments thread of Joe’s post is also worth reading. I left a couple of comments there, comparing energy efficiency to Moore’s Law rather than a fruit tree. Here were my last words on the subject there:

My summary: as we get better and better [at energy efficiency], I predict, we will see more and more that we can be doing. Yes, there will be diminishing returns at some point — but we’re so very far from hitting that point that it need not concern us for at least several decades.

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After a long, ridiculous delay, the FCC has finally approved the merger between Sirius and XM Radio. As we’ve discussed before, the National Association of Broadcasters and others have portrayed the deal as creating a monopoly. But, as the Washington Post’s article on the approval notes,

“The merger’s completion is a relief to shareholders who have expressed frustration with the prolonged approval process. XM and Sirius have struggled financially and have said that joining forces is the only way that they can survive. Music-enabled cellphones, iPods, music Web sites and traditional radio stations all provide increased competition.”

In almost every case, I’m against monopolies. But this isn’t a monopoly. If Popeyes, Church’s, and KFC joined forces into one mega-chain for fried chicken, they wouldn’t have a monopoly on fast food; they’d still be competing with McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen, and every other fast-food chain in the world.* That’s what’s happening in the Sirius-XM deal.

( * Sure, sure — in real life, YUM! Brands owns both KFC and Pizza Hut. But please humor me while I spin out this hypothetical.)

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(Picture by ernop.)

Sometimes you have to fight for every inch.

Ever have one of those days? I’m having one of those weeks.

I’d like to blame the fact that I just got back from vacation, but the trip was restful, and long enough that I’ve enjoyed getting back to the office. (It helps that I work in a very friendly office.)

Lots of productive work conversations over the past few days . . . lots of good projects on the plate . . . just very little apparent ability, at the moment, to think a task all the way through. Which puts me in mind of two things:

1. The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Four hundred years ago, the Jesuit courtier Baltasar Gracián offered loads of good advice in his classic treatise, The Art of Worldly Wisdom. One of the aphorisms that has most stuck with me is this one:

Recognise unlucky Days.

They exist: nothing goes well on them; even though the game may be changed the ill-luck remains. Two tries should be enough to tell if one is in luck to-day or not. Everything is in process of change, even the mind, and no one is always wise [...] To turn out well a thing must be done on its own day. This is why with some everything turns out ill, with others all goes well, even with less trouble. They find everything ready, their wit prompt, their presiding genius favourable, their lucky star in the ascendant. At such times one must seize the occasion and not throw away the slightest chance. [...]

The corollary of this idea is “Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.” Ah, but our employers rightly expect us to come in day after day and put in a good effort — one that brings results.

The best thing I’ve figured out to do, for those days or weeks when “everything turns out ill,” is to find the things you can do — be they ever so few or humble — and then do them. Do them methodically or mechanically or by simple muscle memory, if that’s all you can manage. But keep putting one foot in front of the other. Which brings me to the second thing:

2. Grinding and Dashing.

Great athletic champions — whether individuals or teams — often excel at both “grinding” and “dashing.”

When they can, they “dash” to victory: they go Showtime on their opponents; they blitz the daylights out of them; they flow around their opponents in ways that can’t readily be understood, much less stopped.

But when they must, they slog it out, grinding out play after play, game after game. A paragon of this approach was Ivan Lendl: he wasn’t an elegant tennis player, but he was fitter than all of his opponents, and he would grind out hard, accurate baseline strokes by the dozen, probing the defenses of flashier, more fluid athletes like John McEnroe until he built an impregnable advantage.

The moral of this story is simple: You can be fruitful without being jaw-droppingly awesome.

When you’re living out a week like this one’s been for me, you have to be.

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(Photo by Kiwi Flickr.)

Sometimes we need to peel back the layers of the onion — the hype, the verbiage — to get at what’s basic. So I have some basic questions for you.

This blog is about doing business better (for yourself, for your organization) in today’s world of work. My tendency is to talk about all of this at a high level, e.g. by discussing the implications of permanently higher petroleum prices, or at an immediate level, e.g. by discussing what you personally can do during hard times.

But some questions transcend scale. And here are a few I would love for you to answer in the comments:

How hard is it, really, to succeed in business?

How much of success rests on knowing WHAT to do,
and how much of it rests on the APPLICATION of that knowledge?

Do you already know what you need to know to succeed?
Is it working? Or do you need to know more?

“Hard” is a loaded term, and it might be useful here to point to an earlier post about the difference between things that are cognitively complex, and those that are difficult emotionally.

So, tell me what you think: how hard is it, really?

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(Image by Todd Ehlers.)

Chess players don’t use to-do lists — they just pay attention.

The other day my wife sent me a link to this item by Linda Stone, which gets at a major problem I see all around us in the business world.

Is it Time to Retire the Never-Ending List?

One afternoon, earlier this year, as I was scanning a long list that I was adding to endlessly, I realized, “I’ll never get it all done. That’s probably just fine. But this endless list and this feeling of being completely scheduled . . . it’s not working right now.”

I met some friends for dinner and put the question out: “Do you have a never-ending list? Do you manage your time? Do you manage minutes, tasks, and lists? Do you start each day with a list that has more on it at the end of the day than it did at the beginning of the day, in spite of how many items are completed and crossed off?

“Or do you manage your attention? Do you manage emotions, intention, and make choices about what will and will not get done? What are your favorite ways to do this?”

The article’s not perfect,* but it shines a light on a very important problem, one that I’ve been talking about for a while with my friends. It’s the problem expressed in the title of this post:

Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.

Other resources are fungible, but not time. If you lose money, you can make more money. If you lose a valued member of your team, you can cover for them to some degree, and you can go find another talented person who can succeed them. But if you lose time . . . it’s gone forever.

What’s to be done?

Like Stone, I agree that the answer to handling this one-way flow isn’t to manage time harder and harder. Here’s what Stone found from those she polled:

In the cases where people reported managing their time, they more often reported experiencing burn-out, they didn’t know how much longer they could go on at their particular job or lifestyle. There was often a sense of helplessness and overwhelm. The endless list, the one that gets added to and never completed, at the center of it all, left them with a heavy heart and a burdened sense of tomorrow.

Sound familiar at all? Ringing any bells? Consider the contrast with the “surgeons, artists, and CEO’s” that Stone polled, who “reported that they managed both their time and their attention.”

In surgery, in the studio, and in the time carved out to think through strategies and issues, these professionals reported shutting down the devices and endless inputs (email, phone, interruptions), at scheduled times, and claiming those moments to focus. In almost every case, these professionals reported experiencing “flow” (a la Csikszentmihalyi) in their work.

We’ve talked here before (more than once) about the work of Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His bestselling book Flow explains his psychological research into when and how people experience the deepest satisfaction in their work.

Pay attention!

While the use of time is an important aspect of Flow, it pales in comparison to marshalling full attention toward the work at hand. People report higher satisfaction in their work — even when the work itself is less intrinsically interesting — when they achieve the Flow state, which is characterized by feelings of being “in the zone” and “losing all track of time.”

It’s hard, if not impossible, to lose all track of time when you’re scheduled within an inch of your life. It’s also hard — at least in Linda Stone’s experience and mine — to give full attention to one task when you feel that your task list is out of control and running your life.

Task List Zero?

Part of the reason all this strikes a nerve is that I’ve been working on a long post titled “Task List Zero.” It’s my effort to translate Merlin Mann’s insights from his Inbox Zero to my own ridiculous, Rube Goldberg-like to-do lists.

Irony of ironies, I haven’t been able to focus on that post, work my way through it, even figure out if the concept makes any sense . . . because, what with the press of time and my many obligations, I haven’t given the idea my full attention.

But knowing the problem is half the battle, yes? Stay tuned.

Do you manage your time? Or your attention?

~

Related posts:

• A grook: “To-Do”
• “Workiness” is to work as “truthiness” is to truth.

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* Here’s the part of Stone’s article that gives me pause:

We think we know what attention is. In fact, today’s dictionary will tell us it’s the “concentration of the mental powers upon an object.” This definition assumes our attention can effectively be everywhere, all the time. We haven’t always thought of attention this way.

In 1890, when the psychologist, William James, gave a definition of attention, he described it as, “taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought… It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”

James’s definition is clearly superior because it’s fuller and subtler (and I’m a sucker for a William James quote anyway). But I can’t make any sense of Stone’s analysis of today’s dictionary definition. How does “concentration of the mental powers upon an object” imply that attention can “be everywhere, all the time”? Wouldn’t it tend to imply the opposite, i.e. that attention focuses on . . . “an object”?

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(Photo by Elvert Barnes.)

Are you trying to redline your performance all the time?

It doesn’t work.

We can go along for a little while like that, driving ahead nonstop, never taking our rest, but at some point the bill comes due. We get sick. We get burnt out. Or we just get so overtaxed that we can no longer deliver good work.

The trouble is, many of our plans are based on “happy path” estimates — the kind of projections that predict no downtime, no friction, no need to recharge the batteries, no time to sit and hash things out and think.

I don’t know about you, but my own experience tells me that I’m much more likely to impose these sorts of projections on myself than to have them imposed upon me. If someone else tries to force me to work like a madman, I balk. Yet if I lay out a plan that requires me to work like a madman, all too often I proceed without a second thought. Even though I know it doesn’t work.

The middle of the bell curve

The inspiration for these thoughts came while I was reading a post by Jason Fried at the Signal vs. Noise blog at 37signals:

Urgency is poisonous.

. . . One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.

Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.

When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations. . . .

As is often the case with good blogs, the discussion in the comments magnifies the impact of the post itself, and I was particularly struck by a comment from a business software expert named Neil Wilson:

A good plan should have as much chance of being delivered early as it has late. That way you know you’re in the middle of the bell curve.

Work to tighten your standard deviations so that your estimates are tighter, resist all pressure to move the target to the left of the bell curve. It always ends in tears eventually. . . .

Wilson has it exactly right: you can’t spend all your time at the high end of the bell curve. Yet so many of us — at least if my experience is any guide — continue to plan as though we can deliver our best possible work, on demand, over and over, at top speed.

Worse, we project it for groups of people, and then we act surprised when different players have a hard time coordinating their efforts, or one part of the project runs long and holds up the other parts. The ubiquity of these over-optimistic projections explains the enduring influence of Fred Brooks’ classic book on software management, The Mythical Man-Month. We can’t project top work all the time, because human individuals and groups simply can’t work at the redline for more than short bursts of time.

As Wilson suggests, I and anyone else tempted to make these rosy projections need to get a grip on what we can do with solid work, as a matter of routine, whileworking at ordinary cruising speed.

Moving the bell curve higher

By close attention to smarter working habits and by constant deliberate practice, we can get better — maybe even much better — over time. And when we shift our personal bell curves, our average work will likewise improve. But that process takes time; it doesn’t come from burying the needle into the red.

What does it come from?

• Taking on challenges systematically, expanding expertise bit by bit.
• Eliminating trivia and minutia from the working day . . . which means changing personal habits . . . which implies a process that takes time.
• Building a skill set over time.
• Allowing all of these processes to build on each other over the long haul — to reap compound interest, you might say.

Sometimes, sure, we have to go over the top — we have to respond to a special challenge with special effort in a short span of time. But living in the red is a recipe for flaming out.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. It makes sense to acknowledge it.

My questions to you:

What are you doing to expand your capacities?

Are you guilty of planning for best-case scenarios?

How would your working life improve if you projected
your work more realistically?

~

Related posts:

• SXSW session recap: Jason Fried of 37signals.
• Deliberate practice in the working world.

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(Image from Wikipedia.)

Continuing to clear my backlog of bookmarks, this time focusing on personal psychology and productivity.

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Christine Rosen at The New Atlantis: The Myth of Multitasking

Regular readers will know that I’m a foe of multitasking. Rosen’s exposition of the phenomenon and its pitfalls is excellent. Here’s a quote from one of the scientists she interviews:

“We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”

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CIO Magazine: Change Management - Understanding the Science of Change

I’m going to give this much fuller treatment some other time — my printout of the article is heavily annotated. But for now, please just take my recommendation that this is well worth reading. It bridges corporate management, personal management, and neuroscience. We need more neuroscientifically-informed business journalism like this.

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The New York Times: Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

Another interesting article — this one much shorter — tying brain science to self-management. A sample:

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

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Jessica Abel’s advice at First Second Books

Abel lays out a simple plan for organizing your time using a datebook. She’s talking to young freelancers, but the approach could work for many professionals working in the corporate environment, too.

Taking a little time to get all this in your book will do several things for you. It will become clear to you how much you can reasonably get done in a week. It will become clear where you might need to shorten your daily activities to fit in more drawing. And, most importantly, it will give you concrete goals, so that when you finish what you set out to do, you can cross it off and feel good about yourself, and you can also stop working, sometimes the hardest thing to do for a freelance artist.

That last bit is the kicker for me. You have to have that moment when you can say, “Good, that’s done,” and feel satisfaction about your effort and the rewards of it.

~

(Photo by dhepnar.)

Save your pennies.

That’s what came to mind when I read this snippet from “26 Rules for Recessions,” which Tom Peters posted on his blog earlier this week. Here’s Tom:

Find me a single example of someone who made the history books who hadn’t had the crap kicked out of him-her — typically time and time again. Adversity is the soil of great accomplishment — period. Which doesn’t make getting kicked around any more fun at the time. I’m at a bit of a loss here for pragmatic ideas — assuming you are not the boss of bosses, perhaps a good bet is to form some sort of offensive support group — The Resilience Rambos? The idea is to dwell on the opportunities that doubtless lie amidst the wreckage.

In a comment on the post, I wrote:

Actually, I think the personal solution is the same as the corporate solution: build value over time. As you say, this includes building relationships — a network — over time, and before you need it. Folks who have some sort of assurance, even if it’s as simple as six months’ pay in the bank and a jumbo Rolodex of true-blue friends, have a lot more freedom to act boldly when the chips are down, because they don’t make an emotional connection between the risks (real or perceived) in the marketplace and the risks to their own mortgage or the kids’ college accounts.

He seemed to like my idea: “Yup — I guess I got caught in my own trap — looking for something sexy when something straightforward is the ‘bingo’ strategy!”

Tom’s onto something there: I think that too often we look for that “Bingo!” strategy in tough times, when in fact we’d be better served to focus on the basics.

This is also coming to mind because of conversations I’ve had since I posted my review of Why Works Sucks and How to Fix It. A couple of people have asked me what they can do — or what the book recommends that they do — if they’re the victims of poor work situations, yet not in a management position that would allow them to change those situations by fiat.

Sludging yourself

In every organization I’ve ever been in — good, bad, or mediocre — there’s been someone who was pining to leave. In some cases, it was precisely because the organization was a bad place to work. In others, it was because that person’s particular team or department or boss was toxic. And in some cases, it was simply because the person had other goals in life: to tour the world, to bake cookies for a living, to own their own business, to act in films. Whatever.

Many of the folks I’m taking about put up with all sorts of bad conditions of the type that Ressler and Thompson describe in Why Work Sucks. Their reward for putting up with it, in many cases, was resentment (or outright bitterness); patronizing, rigid schedules; and living in a world filled with what Ressler and Thompson call “Sludge” — the sorts of casual meanness that denigrate anyone who fails to display total selfless loyalty to the organization.

When I think back about these people, many of them focused on what they lacked, or on the limiting conditions that “forced” them to keep doing what they were doing. Examples:

• Lack of a college degree.
• Single parenthood.
• “People don’t understand me.”
• “You can’t get a job with a sociology [film studies, history, classics, etc.] degree.”
• “It’s impossible to break into the film [cookie-baking, novel-writing, etc.] business.”
• “I have three kids.”

And so on. Some of these folks managed to make the complaints funny in a sardonic way. Some of them managed to keep their chins up while they suffered. But all of them — myself, too, at times — made me sad.

Taking charge of YOU

Bear with me if this sounds too self-helpy, but you must take charge of your own life and career — from whatever point in time, from wherever you happen to be. There might be nothing easier in all the world than to bemoan your fate, sigh deeply, and then get back to your cycle of pointless toil, all the while letting yourself off the hook for doing nothing to change the situation.

The careers of countless entrepreneurs, from Thomas Edison to Mrs. Field’s, were based upon the premise that the entrepreneur could rise above limiting circumstances. As Peters rightly points out in the bit I quoted above, the biographies of countless greats across the ages are studded with huge failures and setbacks.

In very many cases, down at the nitty-gritty level, this means taking charge of your personal finances. You need to save more than the average American does. You need to boost your income and control your expenses where you can — and do it with an honest view to the numbers, not with an emotional attachment to your SUV or your deluxe cable package or your restaurant dinners.

The downside: people like SUVs because they’re roomy and they give you a high vantage point and they can haul all of your stuff, all of your friends, all of your kids, and all of their stuff. If I felt I could spare the money and the time for a deluxe digital cable package, I’d happily watch baseball every night of the season. I love eating out. I’m not saying these temptations aren’t real.

I’m also not saying that the challenges of, say, single-parenthood aren’t real. I hope she won’t blush too much when I say so, but I admire my sister enormously for the way she built her career and family as a single mother. It wasn’t easy. But with a little help from friends and family, she took charge of her situation and improved it bit by bit.

The courage to rally for change

Maybe you’re the type who brings about change by silent hard work. Maybe you’re a rabble-rouser. Maybe (like me) you’re good at saying “What if . . .” in a way that gets people thinking instead of making them defensive. Maybe you fit some other category. In any case, you’ll be a far better judge of that than anybody else will — and it’s by figuring out your own style that you’ll figure out your own means of leverage in the working world.

Whether you’re a Sammy Davis, charming people into more enlightened views, or a Norma Rae, agitating for change, or a Robert Noyce, reinventing an industry by smarts and force of will, you can make a difference. More to the point, in my book you don’t have any right to complain if you don’t at least try.

And that’s my antidote for Sludge, for “Work Sucks”-style working environments, or for weathering tough times in your company, your industry, or the economy as a whole.

So, what are YOU doing to take charge of your situation in these trying times?

~

Related posts:

• Book Review: Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It
• The benefits of failure.
• Avoiding the Kitty Genovese syndrome in business.
  

(Photo by babasteve.)

If you can believe it, 2008 is already halfway over. A good time to reflect on how far we’ve come.

Are you halfway to your goals for 2008?

Is your organization halfway to where it should be for this year?

What do you hope the rest of this year holds for you?

~

On a personal note, today is also my mother’s birthday. Happy birthday, Mom!

~

(Photo by McGun.)

It’s not over until you’ve crossed the finish line.

Not partway.

Not half of it.

Not “almost there.”

Not “should be before the end of the week.”

Not “if everything runs on schedule.”

Not as soon as something else falls into place.

Not “except for a few details.”

Not “as soon as we bring everybody into the loop.”

Not “as soon as we agree on deliverables.”

Not “once it finishes compiling.”

Not “as soon as Finance approves the paperwork” or “as soon as the VP signs off on it.”

Not “as soon as the new quarter starts.”

Not “once we fill that position.”

Not “first thing tomorrow.”

Not anything but . . . DONE.

~

(Photo by Neeta Lind.)