When a task consumes your life

I'm working on a single task, part of a much larger project.  It is on the critical path, and I know it is important, but darn it, it has consumed my life.  I hate it when one single decision, one single thread of effort, becomes so time consuming that I have to move other, important, items out of the way to get it done.  I'm definitely working more than 40 hours in a week.

When this happens, it is good to look up every now and then and realize that I cannot "invent" more time in the day.  I have to be efficient with my time and my effort.  My family has already suffered from all the time-stress I'm under and I need to think about every scrap of time.  When the time bucket is full, saving a minute in the afternoon is a minute I don't spend in the evening.  Each minute I spend, whether it is at 9am or 9pm, is time that I could be spending with my family. 

That's the metric: is this bit, this task, this meeting, more important than tickling my 8-year-old daughter or helping my son with his homework, or just holding my wife's hand and talking about our day? 

What's your metric?

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 17, 2007
  If u love your family, then it should be most important.

• Anonymous
  March 18, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2007
  I'm going to have to expand this to a full blog post, but if I have to state it as metrics these would be the main three. Amount of face time with family. Current passive income. Joy level at work. (edit: the following is a side bar to this, and it's either highly relevant, or a complete non-sequitur) This is all wrapped up in a distinction my wife and I are working with right now.   That distinction being the difference between being efficient, and being effective. Where: Someone who is efficient gets things done right. Someone who is effective gets the right things done.