by Serguey Shinder
On a Wednesday morning, out of irritation rather than method, I wrote down everything I was waiting on. There were eleven items. A review of a change that had been open since the previous week. A firewall rule. Test credentials from a partner. An answer from finance about which of two figures was the correct one. A decision about scope that I had asked a manager for twice. And so on down the page, none unreasonable, all of them somebody else's turn.
Not one of those items was on my task list, because none of them were my task. What they were instead was an open tab in my head. I checked messages far more often than the work required, and the reason was that eleven things might have arrived. I reread threads to see whether a reply had appeared underneath. I drafted nudges, did not send them, and rewrote them later so they would not read as impatient. Asked to total it up, I would have said the chasing took twenty minutes a week, and the chasing genuinely did take about twenty minutes a week. The supervision took a great deal more than that and looked like nothing whatsoever.
The other half of the problem is that waiting has no finish. A task completes and stops asking for anything. Something you are waiting on has no completion, no owner on your side and no date, so it hums along at a low volume indefinitely, and eleven low volumes is a room you cannot think in.
What I do now took an hour to set up. Every blocked item goes on one list with a person's name and the date I will chase it. Chasing happens twice a week, in a single batch, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, all of it at once, politely, in about fifteen minutes. Between those two moments an item on that list is not mine and I am not permitted to think about it. Anything still sitting there after a fortnight gets escalated once and then dropped, and I tell the person I have dropped it.
The first batch taught me something about the original eleven. Three had already been answered, in places I was not looking. Two were waiting on me, which I had not noticed, because I had filed the entire exchange under blocked. And two were things nobody was ever going to do, which had been true for a month, and which I had been protecting from that conclusion by continuing to wait for them.
Waiting is work. It occupies exactly the attention you were keeping for something difficult, it appears on no plan, and because it is formally somebody else's turn it never receives a decision from you. Give it a name and a date, or it will quietly take the residue of every day you have.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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