Priorities

They tell you, "If your house needs painting, and it's on fire, put the fire out, first". And this is supposed to teach you how to prioritize things. Folks nod and stroke their chins and move on as if they've just learned something.

I have a problem with this kind of thing. I always have. In Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon there is a story of a kid who saved his money all year and gave it to a friend who would travel to far-off lands and buy jewels. The guy brought back a few chips of colored glass and the kid lost his money. A few pages later, another guy is stuck outside the walls of the city at night, when a shepherd approaches him and makes a fast deal to sell his flock, which nobody can see because it's so dark. It sounds like a lot of sheep, there are sheep-noises coming from over here and over there and the shepherd seems like a nice enough guy and so the kid makes the deal. When the sun rises, he marches the herd into the city and sells the whole lot at a tremendous profit. I have never been able to figure out what we're supposed to learn from this. The first deal could easily have gone well and the second could easily have yielded five or ten widely spaced, noisy sheep.

At home, we're fresh back from the Home Show, with hundreds of vendors vying for our tiny fistfuls of dollars. What to do? We just bought the damned house last summer, and now we're thinking of changing things? Here's something: It's wearing it's third roof, and this one is nearing the end of its life. The water heater is giving up before the second shower is done. But we wish the bathroom was a little more up to date. We wish it had a dishwasher. We wish the driveway and the patio didn't drain into the basement. We wish the hardwood floors were a little fresher. There are unpleasantries in the yard. I am scared to death I will write a check to have something done, then immediately discover we now need a new water heater, or that new roof. Or something else we weren't even really aware of. It happens.

Prioritizing work is a gift. There are some things you just can't quantify. It's the old "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts" deal working again. Lately, I've been working on creating little videos, tiny little movies showing how to do simple little molecular tasks. Instead of coming to a two-hour session with me going over forty-'leven things the new software can do, you can now download as much or as little help as you need. There's a movie showing how to log into the system. If you have questions about how to log in, they are answered here. Nothing else is, but you will definitely learn how to log in. There's a How To Log Off video, too.

It's been difficult at times, because the system I'm teaching is growing and evolving, at the same time. So it's like trying to a hit a moving target. Sometimes I have found myself half way through an issue, only to find that the developers are tuning-up that part of the machine and things won't work Friday the way they did when I made the movie on Tuesday. At other times, I've stumbled upon things that don't quite work as advertised, only to be met with "Oh yeah, that doesn't work, yet" from the crew. Maybe it'll be done in a week, maybe it'll take a month. Maybe it won't be available until Version 2.00. There is definitely an air of plate-spinning at work, here.

But I am confident that this way is going to be a better tool. Sure, it's hard to schedule a training session that runs two hours and is only offered two or three times per month. And what do you do until that day and time rolls around? But everyone has two or three minutes in their day they could use to learn how to build tables in their pages. And why should they have to wade through twenty minutes of working with images, when all they really want to learn is how to build tables?

Some day this summer I'll look back on all of this and laugh.

Or, cry.