This week’s article is not about IT, but about being a professional in general. This Thursday I failed to meet my deadline to post an article to this blog. Instead I was at the office late working in order to complete several projects before another deadline: the end of a manufacturer’s fiscal year.
I hate missing deadlines. Absolutely hate it. The problem is that as you move up in responsibility and burden you have to make decisions about what is going to be dropped. The workload that you will accrue is going to be greater than your capacity for work. You can delegate many things, but delegation itself is work even if it does reduce your overall workload.
Now there are some who will tell you that great talents never fail to deliver. Those people are either lying or naïve.
Great talents, or more precisely great producers, do fail to deliver. They just consistently deliver on the most important priorities and fail to deliver on the least important items. Great producers work on what is truly the highest priority and deal with the consequences of failing to meet lesser priorities. Great producers also cannot prevent tasks from being assigned to them. Great producers realize that they are going to anger somebody by failing to deliver. Great producers just make sure not to anger the wrong people.
Thursday night I dedicated to my employer in order to make sure that the sales people that I work with will be able to deliver the most value that they can to their customers. Last minute projects popped up, and I had to deal with them.
Friday night I dedicated to my family. You might think that means my family is second to my work in terms of my priorities. That is incorrect. My son had a an event on Friday night that was important to him. That is the real reason why I worked so late on Thursday. My first priority was to make sure that I was available on Friday night to be with my family. My second priority was to my employer.
Unfortunately that made my blog the third priority, and I am sorry that I failed to deliver to those of you who have come to expect an article from me every Thursday. I will not make an excuse for missing my deadline. I purposely dropped the blog in order to deal with other priorities. For that I apologize.
That is why I will now be posting an article every Monday instead of Thursday. I have reviewed my process, and I now realize that I have enough time to write two draft articles during the week, one of which I can finalize on Sunday for a Monday posting. This will address two needs: building an inventory of articles from which I can post, and improving the consistency and the quality of my product.
You may not be able to win every time, but you can always learn from your mistakes. I hope that this change shows all of you that I may not always make this blog my top priority, but it is still a priority for me. That is why I will do better with maintaining this blog. Thank you for being a reader of this blog!