Last week was not the kind of work week one would write home about. Although ironically, it does seem the kind of week one might choose to blog about. For many moons now, the business environment has been less than stellar. There’s no doubt the government shutdown on top of an already paralyzing sequestration have made government meetings all but extinct and other meetings wane in their wake. But this past week I was genuinely busy. I was busy undoing work I had done months before.
There might not be anything more frustrating than that. I’d rather hear the crickets than spend valuable time peeling business off my books that had been there for weeks or months. That’s not just unproductive – it’s counterproductive. And no matter what kind of cost savings those who cancel meeting purport to have, there’s a serious cost to the cancellation. Sometimes that cost is tangible and other times its affects are felt for an entire fiscal year or budget cycle. And sometimes the cost is even bigger than that.
It’s the worst kind of work – undoing good work and replacing it with nothing.