We always wish for easy. For less busy work. For more time to focus. But what happens when we get it?
One of my super powers is to make order out of chaos – weather that be keeping my family’s possessions in order (Mom – where’s my…) or planning out the details of a Disney vacation (we need to start here and use this Genie and…). On a really bad day, you will find me cleaning out my closet. My boyfriend knows that if I’m drifting from room to room rearranging furniture and changing out pictures, something is up. I am soothed by practice of busy, repetitive, tidy rows, and neat check boxes.
That super power has extended to my professional life as over the years I gradually became a fixer of all the small things that made up the big things. As a consultant I would be tasked with digging deep into systems and people issues to figure out how goals were constantly being missed. How reports were late or information was inaccurate. A lot of that work consisted of mucking around in databases, tool sets, and workflows. My last two professional roles required me to completely rip apart departments and start over.
The reality of that important work was diving in at every level of detail to understand the minutia so I could build robust, functioning departments with a new vision. I not only had to know what every person on my team was doing, but I had to often do their jobs to learn what was happening and pinch hit as we made changes. My days were insane – often filled to the brim with meetings and follow up and more meetings.
I secretly loved it – the thrill of the check mark in my Asana boards brought me great joy. Even so, I would often complain that my brain hurt or that I just needed this type of person to take the pressure off of me. But an interesting thing happened when that relief appeared.
I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Without the minutia and the weeds, I would find myself in front of my computer at a bit of a loss. Those little, “busy work” items filled my time in tangible, tick off the boxes ways. It was uncomfortable at first to have time to think and dream and trust that the path I created was the right one with the right people helping to forge our way forward.
Today I’m still in the weeds as we build out our new product offering. And one of the promises of this new era of AI is that life will be easier – that these AI assistants will remove the minutia and the busy work and the paper pushing parts of our jobs.
Well what happens after that?
What happens when we DO have time to think and ponder and plan big things and dream big dreams? Are we ready for it – this different kind of working? How do we begin to prepare for a huge shift in how we go about our days/ weeks/ months/ years without measuring it by meetings or tasks in the same way?
Every evolution has a sticking point – a space between what is and what can be while the what can be sorts itself out. As the busy work that filled our hours dissipates, do we have room for evolution?