Everyday Reflections

I have been away from my blog for too long. Not a good sign considering time management is very important to me and try to live by it!! I am trying to reboot myself and again attempting to find time to develop my passion for writing on what I observe in my perosnal as well professional life.

Anyway , coming back to my comeback post .. which should have been a daily writing task has ended being a milestone !(see I already labelled it as “comeback”  post).

Very often in our professional life we quickly slip into mode of achieving things that are regular in nature and could have been taken care through timely checks , follow up , keeping tab on progress or by giving it equal importance as other big tickets things on our todo list. If this happens very regularly , then we can fall into trap of under achievement thinking that we accomplished alot because we are putting more effort giving us perception that we are working hard towards our goal but reality is that we are playing catch-up game and are still far from our real milestones.

Those who would have attended b-school might find this easy to relate , because this happens everytime when you work on assignments.  Although it would have been defined weeks back in time , we postpone it stating it is going to take ‘x’hours & we still have time. Then comes the real milestone date which pushes you to start doing your daily tasks , only to realise that there was more details to the devil than perceived!!

But why worry about this aspect… why am I being so picky..when ultimately the job is done?

It is hard to quantify this aspect but couple of points are worth considering….

1. Quality may get impacted
2. Finer details are ignored because you never got an opportunity to reach that point
3. We don’t achieve much beyond the actual milestone

Managers should have eye for such whirlpools and make effort to avoid them. They should also educate their subordinates as well peers to differentiate between daily tasks versus milestone. Having this approach does not mean that you are not appreciative about the hardwork people put but being judicious in appreciating the real achievement versus patting back for a task that could have been regular under the radar activity if one would timed it and made constant progress as opposed to it gaining sudden importance due to visible hardwork!!