It used to be much easier for me to tell if I’d had a good workday. There was a task that needed to be completed—something that was unfinished at the start of the day but wasn’t anymore by the end. I could look at it to see if I’d done it well or poorly and, without getting too philosophical, conclude what kind of day I’d had.
Today I can work for ten hours and still have nothing to point to at the end of the day and say, “This is what I did.”
I’ve talked to people, changed plans, made decisions, tried to spot a problem before it blew up, extinguished a fire that was just about to start, negotiated about things that don’t exist yet, and thought about those that do—but perhaps shouldn’t exist in quite the same way.
All of this is work. It’s just that it has no form.
That struck me as strange for a long time. When I was starting out, I thought experience would simply make me better at the work I was doing. Instead, the job expanded faster than my original idea of it.
Suddenly I had to understand money, contracts, people, procurement, deadlines, taxes, negotiations, delays, promises—all the loose ends that don’t belong to any specific function and so, sooner or later, land on the owner’s desk.
Sometimes I miss the simplicity of the days when I could finish something with my own hands, take half a step back, and be satisfied with what I saw.
Today, the best work often goes unseen.
There’s no object you’ve made, no page you’ve finished, no machine you’ve repaired, no project you’ve handed over. Sometimes the result is simply that nothing bad happened.
And it seems you just have to get used to that.
A full day, even though nothing remains on the table at the end of it.
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