I got a call from my boss this morning, not so unusual except that today is Saturday. He was reviewing a book that I’ve been working on with him for several months. We are in the homestretch; just reviewing the proofs to make sure everything is copasetic before we go to press.
Unfortunately things were not copasetic.
“The wrong chapter is in this thing!” he said, referring to a chapter that had been submitted late, then shuffled through an edit and copyedit several times, then returned to be rewritten and copyedited again. Somewhere in the hullabaloo of managing 21 other chapters, most of which had also been submitted late, or with changes, or with special instructions, I must have submitted the wrong version to the publisher.
Clearly my boss felt that this a was big enough deal to call me on a Saturday morning,
“I know you are on a deadline, and I didn’t want you to have to find out about this Monday morning,” he said. Thrill: I now have the pleasure of stressing about it for the rest of the weekend.
I supposed he wanted to tell me in case I might find it imperative to go to the office and fix the problem so we’d be back on schedule Monday morning. I browsed my schedule on my Palm Pilot to see what else I had going on this weekend. This is what I had listed for today:
--Read
--Sked hair appointment
--Write/think
--Groceries???
--Plans/JM
Boy, tough day, huh? Still, I shut off my Palm Pilot and went back to my reading. It was very important article in O Magazine.
I’ve found a radical shift in my behavior over the past few months; I surprise even myself sometimes. Here my BOSS is working on weekends and calling me about something important, and I—the underling—cannot find the time to address it.
I’m not trying to be contrary or rebellious. I take great pride in my work. It bothers me that the book schedule is now thrown off because of my mistake. But a new question arises when these things happen? I no longer ask, “What can I do to fix it?” I ask myself, “What am I committed to being, a “Do-er” or a “Visionary”? At least, this is the question that I ask on weekends; when I ask it every day I will be in a new place, at a new level. Employed or not, I will be autonomous.
I can almost see my boss rolling his eyes right now and thinking: How precious. How about “visualizing” getting off your ass and fixing this problem that has infected my Saturday!
All I can say to that is, “I hear ya!” In fact, I have spent countless Saturdays fixing problems, doing data entry, completing things that somehow contributed to the big picture that I simply could not attend to during the week because I had more pressing things to do. (Not pressing to me, necessarily, but to the people who paid me, which, I suppose, is what made all the difference.) The stuff that I did for my own sanity, like organizing my space, goal setting, or drafting an implementation plan, I did in the periphery of my time.
There’s no doubt about it, in business things just have to get DONE. And there are people who simply have to be the Do-ers. I’ve made it a business of sorts being a Do-er. Don’t want to handle that yourself? Give it to me—I’ll do it, for X dollars, or however much you think it’s worth is fine, too. I’ve been hired for many positions, I’m certain, because I have convinced the hiring party that I will get the job done at a price they feel it’s worth getting done. In some cases, I wouldn’t take any pay unless it got done.
But therein lay the problem (other than a complete lack of self-worth): What if you are agreeing to do something that shouldn’t be done in the first place? What if, in your experience of being a do-er, you start to see patterns? Some jobs don’t result in the payoff your employer had hoped for, and you know why. Sometimes, by simply doing and not thinking enough, the fruits of your labor are flawed; you’ve created a widget that has no usefulness, or not as much as it could have. Sometimes you steal a moment to reflect and wonder, why am I doing this?
What if the Do-ers are worn out and fed-up because the process didn’t include consideration of their time, or of their insights into how it could have been done better? Do-ers stop being do-ers. They become Draggers. They stop wanting to Do.
But you’re a Do-er, not a Thinker. You are not paid to make those determinations. You may see that something is a waste of resources, and as the person handling the project you may even have the gumption to mention it. But if no one takes heed of what you are saying, you are still supposed to follow-through with the Doing. That’s what you do. To decide that some projects are not worth doing means you’ve just thought yourself out of a job.
Be patient: This is going somewhere. Stay tuned for Part II: The Do-ers, The Be-ers, and The Visionaries.
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