The Authentic Organization

I want to explore a particular dynamic that emerges as a result of our focus on plans and to do lists in our work life, a dynamic that leads to delusion of perception and distortion of motivation:

If you were to judge your tasks by how much attention and emotional investment they get, you would think that only those things that are not yet done are of any importance. Do you understand what I’m saying? We don’t build up a list of completed tasks over the course of the day, we cross off a list of things to do. We don’t put up a sticky note as a reminder of an important accomplishment, we put up notes of things that we need to do.

There is something horribly out of balance in this. Through force of repetition, this habit deludes us into seeing the deficits and scarcities in our lives more easily than the accomplishments and resources. It distorts and undermines our motivation because the future never really comes and we don’t adequately internalize our completed work. I truly believe that the message we get, deep inside, is that only the unfinished is important.

The irony is that an obsessive and unbalanced focus on things yet to be done goes a long way toward robbing us of our authentic motivation to get them done. As soon as they are done, they’re not important any more.

In my coaching and consulting practice, I counsel people to bring their attention into balance. However uncomfortable it might feel, I recommend that the same amount of time, working resources, and emotional energy go into looking at how time was spent and what was done with it, as looking at future time and what is to be done.

This balancing act can take many different forms: maintaining a Done list with the same visual and functional prominence as the To Do list, clearing every To Do item from the mental and physical field of attention (GTD style), using logs to discover where time has gone, building up the Observe and Reflect components of the planning and action cycle, meditation and other mindfulness exercises.

In a way, the spacious acknowledgment of how we have actually spent our time can be seen as a kind of gratitude practice. There is certainly a kind of brutal lack of gratitude in our normal focus on the unfinished. No matter how hard we work, none of it will ever get the religious attention that the To Do list gets.

There is a common and very natural emotional objection to the practice of investing time and emotional energy in what has already been accomplished: We need to stay focused on the future because there is so much to do and this will distract us. In my experience, the result is actually precisely the opposite. The intentionality of our work becomes more clear, not less. Looking backwards is a kind of retroactive prioritization that deepens our understanding and commitment to the things that are most important to us. Acknowledgment and intent seem to be two sides of the same coin, as do gratitude and desire, their stronger corollaries.