Sunday afternoon and all I can see outside my window are endless blue skies and endless promises of adventures to be had. Instead I am stuck at my laptop racing to beat a few deadlines. So you might say to yourself, "Jack, stop writing these incredibly entertaining posts and get back to work."
To which I'd say, go mother someone else. I don't wear a sweater because you are cold or jump off of a bridge because all the other lemmings did so. Don't know about you but I take a particular pleasure in being a cranky curmudgeon. But more importantly this post is related to my work and I will even explain how by way of a story.
Earlier this year I started a series of posts that covered dad bloggers, also known as the Festival of Fathers- A Blog Experience #18. It was a collection of posts written by dad bloggers that I featured here every Sunday. I did it because I wanted to help create a community among my fellow fathers and because I wanted to generate more traffic and exposure for this joint.
It was very effective and I was quite pleased with it. However it was a bit cumbersome and required a chunk of time. And as my free time shrank I found myself less enamored with it and decided to give it a rest for a while. For the past couple of weeks I have played around with picking it up again but just haven't found enough free time to make it worthwhile.
All was well until Friday afternoon when I participated in The Daddy Blogger Blog Hop and learned that I could have done it all with far greater ease. Had I stopped to think about it or done some simple research I could have taken advantage of technology and made it far simpler.
I owe this impromtu lesson on not reinventing the wheel to A Dad At The Chalkboard because he is the guy behind the old blog hop. And even though he didn't intend for this to work out this way I will offer my thanks for the idea and for providing more blog fodder.
Because this really is a lesson that I work on with my children and something that I have talked about in professional settings quite a bit. There rarely are times when it is truly important to reinvent the wheel. There is nothing lost in trying to find a way to distinguish yourself. No reason not to try and make your mark, but not at the expense of time and productivity.
If someone knows how to do something better than I do I am always happen to listen. It is one of the advantages of age and life experience. It is fine to have an ego, but I'd rather set mine aside and get the work done faster. In the end it provides me with more time to do the things that I want to do.
And now I'll tie this post up in a neat little package. Remember when I said that I was racing to beat a deadline? I have found that blogging is a very effective tool for combating the occasional mental blockage that occurs when I am working on writing articles/essays/proposals. So the five minutes that I just spent writing this post will probably save me a ton of unnecessary aggravation, or at least I hope so.
Check back in with me later and I'll let you know if my little trick worked. For now I... am ....out...of...here.
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