Buck was wrestling with the old, familiar dilemma: how would he find time to finish the important things he needed to complete when his days were becoming jammed with frivolous pursuits that brought him far more enjoyment?
“Take this blog, for example,” he typed, worrying as he did so that he might not be ready for the client meeting tomorrow afternoon if he didn’t stop goofing off and just use his brain for a few minutes to think through the client’s request. “Clearly this is time that could be better served doing whatever it is Buck is supposed to be doing right now.”
What exactly that something was, however, was not immediately clear, and it was precisely that gray area that Buck hoped to avoid addressing altogether. The client had given him an assignment so murky that Buck wasn’t even sure why they needed him to do it at all. Analyze a proposal that they had already written, forming recommendations based on best practices that they had already decided to discard. Be prepared to talk about the proposed process which had, at its core, a requirement that people should be permitted to bypass it completely if they deemed necessary. This was the kind of non-sequitur that left Buck shaking in his loafers.
His manager was still nowhere to be seen, recovering from surgery, but Buck had been promised some guidance by close-of-business Monday (a promise delivered via an email sent from the manager himself over the holidays), so he delayed the analysis until the expert manager had an opportunity to weigh in. Never mind that the “correct” action as dictated by the natural laws of consultancy would be for Buck to perform as much of his own analysis as possible before he talked to the manager, thus ensuring good feedback come review time.
Meanwhile, just twenty-three days separated Buck from his certification exam date. “If Buck doesn’t use this time to address the client’s need,” he pondered in the third person, “could he not instead use it to prepare for the exam?” This was, of course, a fair and legitimate question, yet Buck had no clue why he was procrastinating the test preparation effort. If he failed the exam then his company would not reimburse him the $200 that he had already spent to register for the exam, an exam that would bring him a certification that he pursued by own choice. This was the key point: why would Buck delay something that would ultimately allow him back into a field of work that he actually enjoyed? Was he afraid of failure, or of discovering his limitations? Was he intimidated by some of his firm’s “techies” and their almost godlike IT skills? Or was the inverse true, and he was actually afraid of success? By becoming truly successful at something and becoming all that he was capable of being, perhaps in the future people would set higher expectations for him than he was willing to accept. In the final equation, was he afraid of responsibility?
The more Buck thought about it, the more disgusted he became with himself. He decided to quickly publish the blog entry before it dragged on, then he’d go on to post a question that he already knew the answer to on a ball python forum. A quick check of his email would come after that, and then he’d call the manager on the phone instead of waiting for the call to come to him. If he had any time remaining after that, then he’d do the analysis.
He could always study for the exam at home later that night. Right after “Heroes.”
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