Maquinna's Poop du Jour

Exponential Accumulations

Work and snow. Both seem to be piling up at alarming rates. There is now officially 13 inches (that's 33 cm for all you folks back home) of paper piled up beside me. I estimated that there was about 4 inches of snow on the ground this morning, and the first flakes of the estimated 6-10 inches that are expected to fall today have just begun floating down from the sky. By dawn, I anticipate both piles - work and snow - will be equal.

Where the math begins to get a little tricky is in the estimation of melt rates and the number of hours that need to be put in to get the levels of both snow and work down to zero again. I am not a mathematician, and those of you out there with more knowledge than me in this area are welcome to jump in on this.

Snow is the more straightforward of the two, but less predictable. We have no idea when Mother Nature is going to get off her ass and blow a little warmth this way. For all I know, this snow could still be here in August. We can make a pre-emptive strike, however, and remove the snow manually. This, of course, does not make it disappear, except from view.

Work is more problematic. As we established in an earlier post, doing work breeds more work, so careful handling of this pile is necessary if it is not to grow. Like the snow, it can be manually removed and placed into the circular file, from whence Debbie the Custodian will take it out of my sight at 4:30 today. But like the snow, that doesn't really remove the work - just makes it harder to complete. Some of it will be rendered obsolete eventually, altered by its time and position in the pile, much like metamorphic rock formations. I think the key is to be very selective about which work to do, being sure not to stimulate any further work in the process.

The snow is starting to stick outside already. Another piece of paper has landed on my desk. I am convinced that there is a correlation.

posted by Maquinna @ 1:59 p.m.