Days When The Work To Be Done Just Seems Too Much

A recent spell brought work to be done that just seemed too much. It happens from time to time.

It could be the sheer volume of tasks that just happened to fall on a particular day. We can't always control due dates, whether we're employees or the owner of a business. Clients and customers simply must be served in a timely manner.

Add to this administrative burdens that accompany most jobs, again whether as an employee or owner.

As an employee, I recall once being instructed in a ridiculous online system purchased by my employer to track the entire marketing/sales process. As it was a big company, there were teams that worked on any given situation. Each was responsible for inputting a fair amount of detail that reflected their actions both completed and pending in that process. The claim was once we all got "used to" working with the system, things would flow smoothly. This took a fair amount of time - especially noticeable when added on top of a busy work day. (We'll set aside the actual er, spotty - to put it mildly - results of that endeavor and get back to the subject at hand.) 

So here we are facing one such day. While there's a distinct difference between those of us who perform actual physical labor with our hands and those of us (likely the majority) who work under the general umbrella of "office" work, the same scene greets us as we begin our shift. The tasks have piled up. 

The physical laborers, may be looking at a construction site that's reached a particularly critical stage where a series of tasks must be executed in a coordinated fashion, by a team of workers, within a fixed time frame. The office types may simply have a long list of tasks with deadlines pinned to them, perhaps even an overweening boss looking over their shoulder.

Whatever the situation, we're up against it. 

Well, if today's that day, or if such a day arrives at some point, here's something from our dear Father Willie that might capture our feelings. It's part of a letter he wrote to his Dad when he was a young Jesuit, serving at a school as teacher and prefect. (Aside from the detail of what he faced, note especially the humor. His letters to his father always were laced with humor, even when written years later from the trenches of World War I where he served as a chaplain.)

Let's join Father Willie today, with the spirit he exhibits in his letter. His work may have been daunting, but it looks like he simply got down to it and chipped away, one bit at a time. We can do the same - and perhaps even with a touch of his humor.

You would throw up your hands in horror were you to see my room at the present moment. It is a scene of chaos and disorder that would discourage and frighten even that patient and persevering arranger of confusion and disorder, the Little Mother (Fr Doyle’s nickname for his mother). For the past week examinations have been in full swing. Now it is a comparatively easy task to sit down and set an examination paper that will keep a couple of hundred boys hard at work for three hours; but it is quite a different proposition to wade through and correct the output of the said boys during these hours. Can you wonder, then, that my pale and emaciated countenance grew still paler and more emaciated, and that my hair, usually so well behaved, stood on end, as day by day I watched the pile of examination papers rise higher on my table? But gazing would never reduce that pile, so with a cry to heaven for help I plunged at it and fought my way through to the last sheet.