Progress And The Unseen
Last Friday, at 6:02 PM, I took a deep breath, and powered off my computer. The work week was done, and I felt a sense of accomplishment as I relaxed into thoughts of the weekend. My job requires a lot of recurring tasks that need to be completed on a timeline. When Friday rolled around, I felt great knowing I had cleared my task list.
Fast forward one week, and I felt the same relief. This time, however, I asked myself if I was really making progress since every week; I worked hard to complete the same repetitive tasks. Was this really progress?
That evening, I walked out into the forest and sat down on a large boulder that overlooks a creek bed. I thought about progress. It was hard to discern when I was moving towards a goal, and when I was on the proverbial treadmill where I was working hard, but not moving anywhere. This type of progress keeps us busy, but it also keeps us stuck in the same spot.
My mind drifted to the forest, and I studied the tall pines before me. With time, we can see trees grow taller, but a tree actually grows above ground in two ways: it gets taller, and it increases its girth. It can take a pine tree about five years to increase its girth by a single inch. In that same time, however, the tree can add up to fifteen feet to its height.
It’s interesting that one type of growth was fast and noticeable, while the other type of growth was nearly imperceptible.
There’s a business saying that “what gets measured gets managed.” This concept says we’ll focus on the things we notice, while the things we cannot see are better described as “what’s out of sight is out of mind.”
I wondered how this related to my work, and I realized that I mainly focused on the things that were most visible to me and my organization. The problem with this is that just because something is visible does not mean it is important. The pine tree can grow as tall as it wants, but if it’s not increasing its girth, then the tree becomes incapable of supporting its own weight.
I thought about what kinds of tasks were visible and which ones seemed to be easy to forget about and realized the most important tasks are the ones we cannot see. We focus on visible things like getting more money, buying bigger homes, having more stuff.
Less obvious tasks, however, seem to elude us. These are things like taking care of our health, getting adequate rest, increasing our knowledge, learning how to think critically, developing our character, and learning to be of service to others. Although these goals often go unnoticed, they are necessary to support the weight of our growth.
Repetitive tasks seem important because they usually involve aspects of work we can see. These tasks keep us so busy that we neglect the type of work that will help us grow stronger. Perhaps we would all do a little better to see more of the unseen.