Usually you don’t hear someone described as well-intentioned until they’ve messed up somewhere.

I know too many talented and well-intentioned people who are professionally ineffective. Ineffective, because the result of their effort isn’t meaningful progress toward making tomorrow better than today.

(Measuring better is going to depend on the task at hand. For knowledge work, let’s say better means less repeating yesterday through mindless zombie motions today.)

Never-ending droplets

In some roles, emptying a bucket that will never stop filling up with accumulated droplets is the job description.

The ineffective way to handle these never-empty buckets is to just occasionally dump them in the sink.

It would be a lot more productive to dump these buckets into a garden. Our endless tedium could help produce useful resources — food, flowers, trees, fish-stocked ponds.

Conservation of the point

My point isn’t that you should run around hugging trees (but feel free!). Instead, every time you’re barraged with tedious tasks that have no end in sight, and you can’t automate them, find a way to build a garden out of them.

Instead of repetitively laboring through the same questions in phone calls and e-mail, treat them as a resource for constantly improving your documentation or website in ways you hadn’t originally thought of. Tomorrow those improvements will undoubtedly save everyone time.

Using the same example, you could also make a habit of asking each person who calls or e-mails a question of your own. You could tune your marketing without obnoxious and impersonal surveys.

You’ll start to perk up every time the phone rings.