FINISHNG WHAT YOU STARTED

No I’m not talking about New Year’s resolution. They will come soon enough and I’ll spend enough time trying to figure a good excuse for blowing it. In this case I’m talking more about dreams. The ones you think about that are in reality possible and you just never get passed some starting point to realizing them.

It might be fear or doubt, some negative comment a person made that discouraged, but the bottom line is the project never gets done. Instead in lingers in limbo land, not completed, but started.

Now if you are lucky you can find a way to hide from the project. But sometimes that isn’t possible.

In my case I tried to avoid the procrastination monster by not allowing myself the stupidity of making promises about project I don’t intend to finish. Does it work? Sometimes, just not all the time.

I still have my share of moments when I too start a project and then time passes and before I know it all of sudden what I stopped doing yesterday was months ago. And let me tell you that sure gets embarrassing.

Of course as a Mayor I do have one advantage. I can dream and make some other poor slob of a city employee get stuck doing the actual work. And I do love those moments. Because I can get real creative and preachy in the memos I write about how this person is not living up to their responsibilities. Oh there is a special joy in that tactic when I personally don’t have to do any of the sweating.

One of my favorite tools to use in this situation is guilt trips. And if I can book a trip for one of my employees that they don’t figure a way to give to somebody else that is even better.

You see the one thing I do appreciate is that the way the civil service life is in my city most of my employees approach work the same way I do. They do as little as possible while looking as busy as possible. So that ends up meaning that they know without me having to know the details that they are guilty of slacking off on something.

All I have to do is hint at this reality and how I’m aware of it and it generally will draw some emotional blood. Enough that I don’t even have to say anymore.

Which is so nice because that way I can put pressure on them to get off their behinds and finish the project that I was too lazy to finish. Hey I call that effective delegation of responsibility. You can of course call it whatever you want. And I sure am not going to mention what my employees call.

Life is sure simple when you have somebody else to do all the work and blame when things go wrong. And I’m a very great advocate of maintaining that system even if I don’t admit it to my employees or the voters.