Oh Say Can You RNC?

As an owner and board member of several companies, I find a lot of the political rhetoric around ‘job creation’ very confusing.

When I’m thinking about whether we need to hire more people at a company, here are the things I consider:

– Is demand for the business’ product or service growing?
– Is the current team having trouble keeping up with that growing demand?

And here’s one that thing that I’ve never even remotely considered:

– What’s my personal income tax rate?

Fellow business owners, are you honestly telling me your marginal income tax rate is what drives your hiring decisions?

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Wave Hill

A few months ago, scouting locations for a Dobbin photo shoot, Jess and I headed up to Wave Hill, a public garden in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. It wasn’t quite right for the shoot. But, we discovered, it’s just perfect for an afternoon escape from Manhattan life.

We went back yesterday, to remind ourselves what trees look like, and how excellent it feels to spend a few hours on a sunlit bench, doing absolutely nothing at all.

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Continental

Old parable:

A mother is teaching her daughter how to make pot roast.

“Before we put the roast into the pan,” says the mother, “we cut an inch or two off either end.”

“But why, mommy?” the daughter asks.

“Well,” admits the mother, “I don’t really know. That’s what your grandmother taught me.”

A few months later, the grandmother comes to town.

“Ma,” asks the mother, “when we cook pot roast, why do we cut the ends off the roast? Does it help the roast cook more quickly?”

“No,” the grandmother laughs. “When you were young, I only owned a small pan; I had to cut the ends off a roast to make it fit.”

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I thought of that hackneyed story recently, when I stumbled across this odd bit of history: in 1630, Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony owned the only fork in colonial America. While the fork fad had quickly spread throughout Europe, it hadn’t yet hopped the pond stateside. So while Europeans began to master a fork-driven cutlery style – keeping the fork always in the left hand, and the knife in the right – the Americans, eating with knife and spoon, instead adopted the zig-zag – switching spoon from left hand (to steady the food while cutting) to right (to scoop up the food; impossible with a spoon when held upside-down in the left).

Just shy of four-hundred years later, my kitchen drawer is full of forks. Yet, all my life, I’d eaten in that same zig-zag, spoon-inspired style.

A month or so back, thinking of Governor Wintrop and 1600’s era utensil innovation, I switched to European style, fork held unchangingly in my left hand. And while, at first, the change felt exceedingly strange, soon I started to see the advantages. It made eating more elegant and efficient. And, if I’m ever stuck with a small pan, it would be way more effective when cutting the ends off a pot roast.

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Backlog

And speaking of getting back on track:

In his excellent [*Do it Tomorrow*](http://amzn.com/0340909129), British time management guru Michael Forster observes that, on average, the number of incoming tasks, emails, whatever, that come into your life each day needs to line up with the number you can process, respond to, etc., over the course of that same average day. Otherwise, you end up progressively further and further behind with each day passing.

Once you’re behind, it’s increasingly tough to catch back up. It’s like bailing water out of a ship that’s already flooded. So Forster puts out an excellently elegant solution: declare a backlog, and move everything that’s come in prior to right this second to a separate list (or, for email, folder). Then focus, first, just on making sure you’re keeping up, day after day, with the new stuff as it comes in from here forward. After that, as time allows, then whittle away at the backlog.

Due to a slew of factors, which mostly boil down to me trying to juggle too much all at once, I realized earlier this week that I wasn’t even close to keeping up. My to-do list had hit 200 items – well beyond what I might hope to accomplish in a day, or even in a month. So, on Monday, I called shenanigans, and declared a backlog. I’m hitting new work as it comes in first, and slowly whittling away at those 200 items as the rest of my day allows.

If nothing else, it’s a good chance for me to watch carefully how much work comes in, and how much I can get back out, in a given day. If I can’t stay at inbox and task list zero, then I have to toss some commitments, or otherwise whittle away at the demands on my life.

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