The Round File

File under Procrastinate

In 1997 I was a new lieutenant in the Army at my first post in Korea. I was learning how to survive in the military, how to be an officer, and how not to be a college student all at the same time. The funny thing about being a staff officer in Korea in the Army was how much people worked there, primarily because it was difficult to do anything else. Wake up in the morning, go to PT, go to work, go to dinner, go back to work, go home around 9 or 10 p.m., go to bed, then wake up and do it again. There were few distractions, and few other ways to pass the time. Now what was only evident several years after leaving Korea was not that there were a whole lot of things to do, but rather there was just a lot of time to do things.

And this created workloads that seemed astronomical. People had time to create tasks, write emails, and make busy work for themselves and others because that was the expectation. Dealing with the mountains of requests, emails, and papers became a difficult task (fortunately we had the time!). But my boss, now a Brigadier General, had a novel idea that has stuck with me. He would assess each email or paper quickly and hold for action certain items, then put the rest of the items and printed emails in the bottom drawer of his desk. About 95% of all incoming items ended up in the drawer. If at any time he needed to go through the pile in the drawer to find a specific email or document, it was important enough to address. At the end of the month he threw the rest of the drawer out (in the round file) as it never again reached any level of importance.

His idea, borne out of necessity by the sheer number of “action items”, sifts through the piles of useless activities, using time as the filter. He could have easily spent time addressing each item carefully without any specific benefit to the endstate of his job or office, but instead he procrastinated on many items in order to more clearly understand their importance. He used his initial analysis to determine the critical items, then he relied on a simple statement to determine what else is important – “If I think about it, or someone asks me about it again, it has importance.”  It was that black and white.

There’s obviously risk in that approach and in the next post we’ll talk about what the initial analysis looks like and how we characterize that risk.

Song of the Day
Not having been blessed with the MP3 revolution yet in 1997 I listened to the same CDs and tapes over and over again. In honor of Korea, the 1/506th Infantry Battalion, the Sony Walkman, and playing a tape until it breaks, the song of the day is Portishead’s “Roads”.