Depending on where you work, there are many things that must be handled in a “right now” time-sensitive manner. Without question, sometimes minutes or seconds count. In fairness, though, 99.997% of the time, what we’re doing doesn’t fall into that category. We’re not defusing bombs and we’re not performing heart surgery. We’re writing reports and creating PowerPoint presentations.

Occasionally, because of pressure being exerted from echelons above reality or our own inflated sense of importance, we’ll mistake our report writing and PowerPoint building for an actual life or death situation. I’m going to go on the record here and say that no matter how important you think the issue is, there’s nothing we’re doing on a day-to-day basis that can’t wait until we step away from the urinal.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.