Administrivia

I spent most of yesterday swimming through it, yesterday. Part of the time I kept telling myself: Every unexceptional task and laborious detail that I can devote my labors to completing effectively and in a "missional" way (how very fast-company of me), means that the world will have a little more justice and mercy in someone's very real and lived existence.

And I believe that. (not for all administrivia -- but if you adminsterTOWARD the ends of goodness...)

But then there are these other moments when my rolling chair is scooted back, and I'm trying to get a birds eye view of the pressing tasks that are filling my desk. So what do I do? Sort (of course).

Here are the names of my piles:

1. REALLY really vital, must do before I go home.
2. Really quite vital must do within a week.
3. These things need three holes punched in them.
4. I should file these things sometime, but their homes are too deep to file them right now.
5. These need to be filed in the immediatly pressing pile, but the files that they need to be filed in aren't IN the immediatly pressing pile, so I've got to do something else with them.
and:
6. send this to somebody else.

Jay calls number 6 the Calvin Coolidge approach to leadership.

and the absurdity of this particular task and these particular divisions is not lost on me...and I think to myself, self?! what are you doing here? Who invented a world shaped like this for people to live in?

In one of my favorite novels _All the Names_ (Jose Saramago), the main character is a clerk who does nothing but shelve files and sort files.

What kind of dreams do you have if you do that all day long?