Some Done/Some Not

This past weekend, I continued to beat down the Mighty List of All Tasks.  The frustrating part is that while there is lots of progress, there are few things that finally get DONE.  With too many things, there is just a little bit more to do, that 80/20 rule still hanging on to me.  It is a little bit blah, because it feels good to finish something and cross it off your list, but when you make lots of progress, but don't quite finish, it sort of hangs on you.

I did get some things done.  The first draft of homework for the Deputies is finished and just needs some other eyes to review it and make sure that the questions and answers make sense and are correct.  The legislative deadline has come and gone, so anything that anyone was doing on that front is now over.

But then some things are cross-overs.  The books and attachments that will be burned onto CDs are done and getting burnt, but there are a couple of items that might have otherwise gone on that which are not done, like the calendar (still waiting on a few places) so they not only have to be finished, but now they will have to be copied separately too.  Does that count as a new task or not finishing an old one?

And some things, like appointments to this and that are just plain not done and still need to be worked.  In some instances, I have names for the spots and just need to get letters out, but in some cases, I have no names.  It is very geographic too, I have found.  I've got a whole four inch binder of member records and member resumes but sometimes out of the hundreds of people in my book, not one of them lives in a particular area that I need.

I must say that the member resumes that people send in have been enormously helpful and I am very excited about getting some members involved that weren't before.  But not everyone fills in the most useful information, so that is less useful.  On the member records, filling in the occupation is priceless because we have lots of jobs that need a particular skill, maybe accounting or health services or law or even IT experience.  Location is important too, but even more important are skills and interests.  A person's occupation does not always tell all that they can do.  Someone might be a nutritionist by day, but have great craft skills that can be used on a number of committees.  If those aren't written in, there is no way to know about them.
 
Even when you have names though, timing can become an issue.  That people could do this before e-mail is astonishing to me and I am so grateful that I do have e-mail to help me.  But that made me wonder a little bit too.  I mean, before e-mail, if you wanted to ask someone to do something and they lived far away, you usually would send them a letter, but then you had to wait for their response to come back by mail too.  If you had to ask three or four people to take a spot, waiting each time until the one you first asked says yes or no before moving on to the next one, then how many months would it take to get done?  I am told that just as many people say yes and no nowadays as they used to and that hasn't changed.  What I am told has changed is the size of the pool of people on whom to draw, especially in some areas of our state.  But if people used to get three and four and five rejections before filling a spot before, how ever did they get done in time using nothing but mail and the occasional VERY EXPENSIVE phone call?

Of course, I am also sure that people who did this right when people were just starting to have telephones probably said the same thing about people who didn't have that convenience. :-)  And every time I hear someone say that we can't do something by e-mail or over the Internet because not everyone has an e-mail address or Internet access, I always hear an echo of some long ago forgotten era Sister saying "But we can't use telephones for that - not everyone has a telephone number or access to a telephone.  No!  We need to stick to mail because everyone has that!

This weekend, I am staying home and beating down the list some more (Back, Back, Dread Beast!) and will miss the Official Visits.  It is disappointing because the Grand Family is going to some really nice and fun areas this weekend, but "We have to do the boring things before we do the fun things" and I have a lot of filing and drafting and mailing (oh my!) to do.