Letting Fires Burn

A while back

I wrote a post about creating clarity. You can read it here. In that, I referenced a story about a team member who was working to help solve a problem for another employee and how I redirected their efforts. I was practicing letting fires burn.

Let Fires Burn

Now, there are a lot of other things in that situation I could go into. Things about serving everyone because we’re all one team, things about helping “train” people to make requests in a way that helps our goals so that we can all be more of one team and meet those goals. At the time of that conversation, those weren’t the biggest fires. That’s the thing, there are different types of fires. When you set something as a goal, that means other things aren’t the goal. Concentrating on something is to neglect something else. Also, it’s appropriate. You’ll be able to come back around to those other fires once they’re big enough. Eventually once all the big fires are small you go to the biggest small fire and make it smaller. You can’t do all the things and everything is iterative. Eventually, you’ll be in a better spot and your organization will be better for it.

You have a schedule.

If you’re smart you do. What you realize is that you can’t do everything at the same time, so you place them in specific times on a calendar. You have a schedule for a reason. It’s called intentional procrastination. You’re intentionally letting some fires burn and fighting the more important ones. You’re putting some things off to later so that you can do the right things now and the things you put off to later will be the right things in their own time.

So be encouraged to fight the pressure of all the things and instead do the right things now.