“You are right,” Kristen relented. “I really am too busy. My priorities are focused on short term fires. I feel like all I do, all day long, gets consumed with management issues and keeping people motivated. I don’t have time to work on basic stuff like writing job descriptions. When I look at doing that, it is so far down my urgency scale, I almost think writing a job description is silly.”

“What would be the payoff?” I asked.

“The payoff? I can’t even think about the payoff. I could write a job description and then I would have a job description, but I would be further behind dealing with all the crap,” she explained.

“Kristen, you are not unlike most managers,” I nodded. “If you could truly focus on getting the right people, most of the crap you deal with would largely go away.

“Stop working on crap and start working on systems. Your life will only improve when you start working on systems.” -TF