by Serguey Shinder
It was a weekly status summary for three people, assembled out of four sources, and it was mine because I had written the queries in 2019. Call it forty minutes on a Friday afternoon. Sometimes an hour, if one of the sources was being difficult.
Twice a year somebody offered to take it on, and twice a year I did the same sum and reached the same answer. Writing it down properly, sitting with someone for an hour while they did it, then answering their questions for a fortnight afterwards, would cost me three or four hours. Against forty minutes a week that I could simply do without thinking. Each time, the handover looked like the expensive option, and each time I was quietly relieved to have settled it.
The sum was wrong in a particular way. I was weighing a lump of cost arriving this month against a stream of cost arriving forever, and a lump always feels heavier than a stream. Three hours once, against about thirty-five hours a year, every year, for as long as I stayed.
It was also not forty minutes. It was forty minutes on the specific afternoon when the rest of the week was pressing hardest, because Friday afternoon is where everything unfinished collects. And underneath that there was a low hum of knowing, from about Wednesday onwards, that Friday had a thing in it, which is not time you can measure but is certainly time you pay.
What ended it was a week off with flu. The summary did not go out. On the Thursday one of the three asked where it was. The other two never mentioned it, then or afterwards. Four years of evidence about how much that document mattered, delivered in a week, and available to me at any point had I been willing to find out.
The handover took two hours. What I did not expect was what happened next. The person who took it over changed it inside the first month. She removed a section nobody read, and automated a step I had been doing by hand every single week because I had built it that way in 2019 and had never once looked at it with fresh eyes. She was not better at it than me. She simply met it without four years of history, which is a thing only a new owner can do.
The rule I keep now is that anything recurring I own gets handed on or deleted within its first year. And if I cannot explain it to somebody in an hour, that is not a reason to keep hold of it. That is the finding.
A routine only you can run is not a task. It is a small permanent tax you have agreed to pay in order to avoid one uncomfortable afternoon.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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