My wife and I had a moment the other night that’s been sticking with me. It was about 9pm, kids are finally down, and I’m feeling pretty good because I’d packed my son’s bag for his baseball practice the next day. Cleats, glove, helmet, water bottle.
Done. I mentioned it to her, expecting a little nod or something. Instead, she just looked tired and said, “Did you check if his uniform is clean?” It wasn’t.
And just like that, I saw the gap. I did the task I saw right in
The frame ‘waiting for tasks’ isn’t quite right, because you did initiate one. The conflation is between completing a task and closing a process. Packing the bag is a task.
“Son is ready for practice tomorrow” is the process, and it has dependencies (is the uniform clean? where are the cleats from last time?). You closed a ticket for one step, but she was still holding the project plan.
The exhaustion is from having to be the one who always has to check the dependency list before the whole thing can be marked ‘done’. That’s the part that doesn’t scale.
You executed the protocol; she wrote it. 💉
project management vs task execution.