The Regenerate Web

Priorities - a cautionary tale

Earlier this month was the first time in twenty years that I have not gone to work late on the first day of my kid's school.  Don't get me wrong, I still have kids in school, it is just that due to a conflict between other work and personal schedules, I needed to schedule a critical meeting at work this morning.  

In my family, we have a tradition, that on the first day of school, my wife and I drive or walk the kids to school or load them on the bus, and spend some time together over breakfast remembering the summer, and thinking about how they have grown, or any school concerns we have.  Usually my wife is concerned about being alone more.  Over the years it has been a precious tradition, and my wife and I have come to rely on it.  My kids have too.  That day my 8th grader was unhappy that I was not going to be there to see him off to school.  

I was scheduled to be off work the following day, as I was building a storage shed in my backyard.  Since I arranged for a friend to come and help me with that, I had already ordered the lumber and torn down the old shed, when this meeting came up, I didn't want to try to reschedule the shed project.  

My attitude that morning was one of resentment.  I had very little confidence that this meeting would accomplish it's objective.  We had a specific technology problem that we had been postponing solving for 6 months.  Several times people had offered suggestions and attempted to build consensus around a solution and it had not happened.  I was one of those and I got beaten and bruised for my effort.  Our project was critically late, and at risk of failing it's political viability date.  That is the date at which if we haven't delivered, it is not politically viable to be affiliated with the project.  

Before the meeting I said this prayer:
In spite of my poor attitude, the meeting did go well and we did reach consensus.

So why is this about priorities?  Because I had a personal conflict of priorities around this meeting.  This meeting became critical, because of our lack of priority around resolving this issue, which has now become the critical path of our project.  As a manager, I recognize that part of my job is to make sure that I (or someone I assign) control the critical path of each project by making sure that all the appropriate decisions get made before they hit the critical path.  While there are always things that happen that are beyond our control that change the critical path - resource issues, and external forces that are unforseen, but the vast majority of things are well within our control, if we just would exercise that control.