By Art Gillis

If it rained every Saturday, I’d be a rich genius. So please understand, folks, I’m not a workaholic, and I love outdoor recreation. But when I work on rainy Saturdays, all kinds of good things happen. I hope you’ll catch a mild touch of this disease. Saturday’s work should consist of these kinds of activities:
1. Fix what you broke last week.
2. Establish a structure that will eliminate future breaks.
3. Create something.
4. Push back and criticize yourself.
5. Send a thank-you note to people you overlooked.

1. To fix last week, start with your old mail. Look at all those e-mails you didn’t have time to answer and do something about them. For those e-mails you answered in a rage, trump them with a milder version that says something like, “I was in a bad mood.” Everyone will love you for being just like them.

2. Establishing a structure starts with setting up a triage. Some things are critical and you have to stop what you’re doing to address the intrusion in real-time. For me, it’s a call from my bride of 44 years telling me to pick up a Belgian endive on my way home from work. Some things can wait a little while, but you need to resolve them before you go home. Some things can go into the circular file. The patient died and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. If you have anything in your in basket at the end of the day, then you failed at structure building.

3. Creating something is not for everyone, but you can still do something. Look at Bill Gates. He created one thing and just milked it dry. He also created several things that died on the vine. Here’s my score. In 1974 I had one single raison d’etre - to help community banks with their technology. Today I have 16 products and services that produce revenue for my consulting practice. Doing the math, one sees that I created a new product every two years. Donald Trump would have fired me for that performance. Booz Allen & Hamilton (my former employer) would have honored me since there hadn’t been a new idea there for decades.

4. Pushing back means removing yourself from the process and looking at things with a purely objective microscope. Are you on the right track? Are you doing the right things for your client? Could someone else do your job better? Condi Rice is taking cheap shots at Donald Rumsfeld. That’s not the point. Why wasn’t Rummy taking cheap shots at himself?

5. I haven’t counted them, but I reorder thank-you notes by the hundreds. So many people have done good deeds on my behalf, that I want to tell them in my own words how much I appreciate them. You’d have to ask a shrink why I use physical cards, an envelope and a stamp. All I can tell you is I need to do it that way. In 1983, I sent a thank you note to Art Buchwald. He sent back a letter dated June 14, 1983. When I read it today, I realized he had practiced the five elements of Saturday’s work in that one brief letter.

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