The Danger of Little Issues...

I came across a great article a couple weeks back about the danger of little issues... the foundation of this article was that every day we get interupted in ways that force us to change what we're focused on, deal with an emergency, and then re-focus back on the task at hand.

This articule suggested that these "shifts" cause us to lose more time then if we could just merrily work through one project at a time... makes sense, huh?  

What's really interesting is that this article suggested that the LITTLE things actually cause you more long-term grief than the big things. The reasoning was that when you come across a big issue you learn in a big way... and subconsciously take action to resolve it in the future. The problem with little issues is that they only take 1/2 an hour to resolve... and you become complacent in resolving them... twice a week... for a year.

Why is this worth mentioning? Today while setting up for our NADA trade show (www.nada.org) I ended up spending an hour trouble-shooting some file location issues on our demo server. It's a stupid virtual-drive issue that only occurs in certain environments and generally takes me about an hour to figure out.

The trouble is that we've grown complacent in spending an hour on this issue... instead of focusing on why we need a virtual-drive in the first place. If we'd reworked our pathing a year ago, I wouldn't get bothered by this every few weeks.

Once you identify the "Little Issue" it's all about committing yourself to resolving it... we're in mad-panic trade show mode right now so let's see what we can do after we get back from San Francisco...

To be continued...