Living with Yesterday’s Best
Sometimes I am better than I was yesterday. Usually that’s a good thin, but it can be a problem for me because I start feeling bad about yesterday’s work — I fell that I should have done it better yesterday.
Sometimes I am worse than I was yesterday, either because I am tired, or I’m distracted, or I just have a headache. And that can be a problem — after all I should be getting better — not worse.
These feelings of guilt are very much related to the problem I discussed in “Always doing your best considered harmful?”
I feel like I ought to always do my best. The problem is that when your best changes day by day, hour by hour, you’ll never be doing your best by some definition of “your best”.
The other day in my annual review we were talking about how I helped someone in my team with managing his tasks and priorities. This individual had definitely turned a corner and the same people who had criticized him a few months earlier were now singing his praises. But I wasn’t as happy about this as I should have been — after all I should have helped him turn this corner months or years earlier — it turned out to be so easy. All I had to do was re-define his job requirements in terms that motivated him. He is a real people person and doing everyday project work was hard for him, but when the work was framed by who he would be helping and how it would make their life better he was happy, even excited to do it. All I had to do was tell him “your job is to keep X, Y and Z happy by doing A, B and C,” and he clicked into gear. Why didn’t I do this a couple of years ago?
Because I didn’t know what needed to happen yet. I’m working to learn that there is no shame in getting better — even though that means that I used to be worse.