One of our admins retired. After twenty plus years, time to enjoy retirement. We gave her a proper sendoff with a card and a lunch.
Over the last couple of years, every single contract ran through her. For an agency all about spending money to build stuff, she was the cog.
The next day I went through all our workflows erasing her name.
It was a cold exercise. But government business, keeps on marching. I hope she’s enjoying the time off. It must be better than putting up with us.
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Some Links
I’ve heard that Merlin Mann no longer supports his own Inbox Zero idea, but I do (for work). I tell interns that they need to be observant and reliable. I don’t know how to teach observant, but having a minimal inbox (along with a solid process for tracking archived emails) is a great way to become absolutely dependable.
Seth Godin is the original daily blogger. To be honest I’ve moved on his self help, but reading his daily posts for the first fifteen years of my career ingrained an ethos of care and generosity that has taken me far in this profession.
A few months ago, a video introduced me to the Cult of Done manifesto. As a hoarder, I have a hard time throwing things away, certainly not after a week. But still, it’s been influential in clarifying what I want to work on.
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you’re done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more.
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Thanks for reading!
Justus Pang, RA