↬ Treat yourself as your favourite colleague

Colin Marshall, on his old blog (which had an amazing name : The War on Mediocrity), had a post that came to my mind just after writing my first post, Your work’s output is someone else’s input. In Future Colin’s servant, Mr Marshall explains a quite potent point of view :

It’s almost funny, the degree of power I wield over Future Colin. I control whether he’s in shape or out of shape, whether he has a lot of money or a little money, whether he’s experienced or inexperienced, whether he’s prepared or unprepared to face the world and its myriad challenges. He’s helpless without me, nothing, a babe in the woods. My job has me constantly rolling out the red carpet, clearing his way and scheduling his minutia. Were I to fall asleep at the switch, he’d be finished.

If you subscribe to his view, we can safely assume that your work’s output will one day become your input. We’ve all once mashed our keyboards in order to finish something quick in order to get done, only to rediscover this work as a pile of unusable mustard. Acting on this means, for example :

• for programmers, commenting your own code, even if you don’t plan on sharing it,
• for writers, leaving yourself a thread of thought as you save your document and shut down your text editor,
• for artists, leaving yourself a clear task for your next workday.

This means treating yourself as your favorite colleague, to whom you would never leave a messy project or unclear tasks and goals.