It’s been a challenging few weeks around here.
In the midst of all the normal chaos of life and business, we closed one of our therapy offices. Or maybe I should say the proverbial straw that almost broke the camel’s back was that we closed one of our therapy offices.
Now, you might think closing an office should lessen the busyness. I mean, after all, that is one less area to focus on, one less set of responsibilities. It should release some time for other activities, right?
In the long run that is what I am sure will happen, but this week the opposite was true. This week we had to invest even more time, energy and effort into something that was ending.
It made me wonder if this is why we don’t end things we know we need to.
You know what I mean, right?
Every one of us is busy. In fact, I cannot think of a single person I know who is not excessively busy and my guess is you are no exception.
And yet, with all our busyness we don’t end the things we need to end.
Why? One reason is because stopping something takes more energy in the moment than just continuing.
It’s just like the reason we parents do our kid’s chores. It’s sooo much easier and faster to just do it ourselves than fight with our kids, only to have them do a mediocre job that we either redo or argue with them to redo until they do it right. Sure, we know the “right” thing is to teach our kids responsibility, but it is so much easier to just do it for them “this one time.”
The same is true for endings. It is so much easier to just continue on with what we’re doing. Besides, it doesn’t take that much time to …(fill in the blank). The office we just closed, for example. It was making money. Why would anyone in their right mind close an office that was making money? It really boiled down to my time, energy and effort. We had undergone several staff changes over the past few years and although still profitable, it’s profitability was about to go way down. To get the office back to where it would need to be, would take more time, energy and effort on my part that I wanted to focus elsewhere (The Human Leader for instance).
[reminder]So, what do you need to end?[/reminder]