Sisyphus Revisited

So lately I’ve been thinking of Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology who was doomed for eternity to roll a huge boulder up a hill and watch it slide back down again before he could reach the top. In high school when we first read about him, I remember thinking this would be a bad way to spend eternity, as it would be constant boredom… doing the same thing over and over and over and over again for eternity. Now… I realize it would be worse.

You’d never do anything different, or fun, or challenging, or rewarding… or unexpectedly disappointing. You would just roll the rock up the slope, try to keep it moving, wondering “Will it begin to slide now? The next moment? The one after?” This tedious task would begin to dominate your thought processes and slowly consume your thinking. Your cognitive world would close in to just these thoughts, this task, this struggle.

What would it be like to think this way forever? Each new moment of powerlessness would feel like the previous ones. You’d walk the same steps over and over, and recall these same feelings over and over, since you actually were in the exact same state and exact same place as the last time you felt them, and if never aged… then you would be in the exact same moment as the last time you felt them. Your emotional world would close in to just these feelings. You would just recall the same memories over and over, and just feel the same feelings of powerlessness and frustration over and over, and just recognize the pointlessness of your work over and over.

So my job’s not that bad, but why have I been thinking of him?

Lately, work has become mostly like pushing a rock up a hill. Nothing can be accomplished quickly or easily no matter how simple it is. Every issue needs ten emails with five people over three to four weeks to reach the point of discussing what we might do. I’ve started focusing mostly on the “pending” matters I need to continuously follow-up on. They never resolve so I can never finish what I started doing. They never move to “done” so I can focus on something new. Each time I check my inbox, I see more complaints about the same things; the longer a problem continues, the larger its scope and impact. Each email is a new moment of powerlessness, which I compare to the previous moment. This becomes tiring, so I stop reading email. Ironically, I realize this spreads the sense of powerlessness to others fairly effectively.

So what does this have to do with Getting Things Done?

• This kind of environment makes it hard to “get in the flow” of productive work. It’s a constant interruption to once again follow up on something that’s not resolved, once again say “I don’t know because I haven’t heard back but I’ll ask again….” More and more things become “pending” and nothing moves to “done.” You never get the feeling of accomplishment or success.
• This has started to consume my spare thought processes. The other day while walking home I thought, “I should start of list of Good Ideas I Finally Abandoned. It might be easier to let go of the fact that some reasonable things just can’t be accomplished now. It might be easier to think, “One day, when the situation changes, I will go back to this list and look up these ideas and try them again.” I would make the list and put things on it, but that’s one step closer to the point where I stop trying to be innovative.
• This feels like being in exactly the same place as the last time. Time to nag someone again with an email I know won’t be answered, but if I send it, then follow up, then follow up again, THEN I can cc someone else and say I’m getting no response…. You just plan on wasting two weeks with things since you can’t get it done quickly or easily.

So like I said, it’s not as bad as being in hell. But what do I do to get out of the funk? That’s another post.