Effort

15 February 2007

Sick days.

I, since leaving school, have never had a sick day.

Not one unplanned day off work.

So why do some people take them all the time? Am I unusually healthy; extremely lucky that I don’t have to take 1-2 days off ill every month? I really don’t think so.

The corollary of this is people that work late.

In my current job I’ve stayed working late twice in the year and a half I’ve been there – both times because I was stuck in meetings that overran. I get my work done during the day – during the time I get paid for. I’ve never come across a time where I’ve had to stay late due to something needing to be done now, even though we frequently have very tight deadlines.

This contrasts with the large amount of people that both stay late, and seem to be perpetually busy; rushed off their feet. Do they really have that much more work to do, or is it just a state of mind?

I think so many things – almost everything, in fact – come down to your state of mind. If you decide that you are “busy”, then you will be busy. If you decide you are going to have to stay late, you will.

The same thing applies with work and projects. If you decide at the outset of a project that it’s going to be a huge, complicated operation then there’s almost nothing you can do to change that – even if it’s not. So many problems can be solved in a fast, light, nimble fashion if you go about it in the right way, but thinking about a problem in that way can take a lot of effort.

And effort – the lack of it, at least – is the big problem.

From: Articles

15 February 2007