Thank God It’s Friday. I’m feeling a bit under the weather tonight, so at home resting after a nice dinner at Dunman Food Centre with Ai Lin.
This week was an interesting one in terms of working life. I had a new colleague join my branch on Monday – fresh grad from NUS. So this week has sort of been partly doing work, partly trying to welcome and mentor my new colleague.
This week was also the week for performance evaluation by the bosses. Still don’t know what the results are, and won’t know for a while, but this and the arrival of a new colleague brought on some deep thoughts about working life.
The more I work, the more I realise how important it is to know your objectives. I first came across this in 2006, when I went for my first reservist, which was a Basic Intelligence Officer Course. That was where I met CPT (now MAJ, I think) Edmund Yap. He is one funny fellow, but what he taught has stayed with me since that course:
“Always start with your intent. What is your intent? What is your objective? Focus on that first”
It seems as if it’s something really straightforward and easy to do, but in reality, it’s really hard to do. Sometimes in life, we catch ourselves doing something and ask ourselves, “why am I doing this?”. Usually, it’s in the case where you think you’re wasting your time doing something rather meaningless. Or in other cases, we spend so much effort trying to deal with exact details of how we’re doing stuff, that we forget the bigger picture.
I’m really guilty of this sometimes. I spend way to much time trying to figure out if a website button should be red or blue, instead of looking at the bigger issues and dealing with them.
Please don’t get me wrong. Details are important – meaning that there’s sometimes a need to pay attention to the details in order to get things right. It’s important then to decide which details are important, and which aren’t so important. I think this ability to discern only comes with experience.
Anyway, the intent and objective of any project is the key. You should always go back to the intent when making a major decision about the details. My ex-boss used to say, “Don’t spend too much time looking at the tree, until you can’t see the forest that it’s part of”.
Come to think of it, this post is actually about two things:
1) Being clear about your objective and always going back to this objective when faced with a decision. Don’t let the details determine what your objective is.
2) Don’t worry about the details unnecessarily if you still can achieve your objective. When you’re spending too much time on a decision on the details, stop and ask yourself, in the bigger scheme, is this important. If it is, how does the larger objective get affected by this detail. If it doesn’t affect the bigger scheme, decide and move on.
So knowing your objective and intent is important. Not just in projecs but in life. So what is/are your objective(s) in life? Bear this in mind and work the details to achieve them.
