At the holidays, there’s good waiting and there’s bad waiting.
If you’re a kid who celebrates Christmas, waiting for Santa is good waiting.
If your stove stopped working right after you pulled out the Thanksgiving turkey and the appliance repair guy keeps ordering parts that don’t actually repair it, and if he never shows up anywhere near the three-hour window you were given, and if you’re starting to get worried because Christmas cooking is near, well, that’s bad waiting. Or so I’ve heard…
As we head into the holidays, here are two examples of good waiting and another example of a way around the bad waits.
We recently had an offsite with the four people who work on @The Company of Dads – Emily, Helder, Terry and Skip. I’d met three of them in person before, but we’d never all been together – and this team has been in place for nearly two years.
It was time.
And it was worth it.
I calmed my desire to maximize our productivity and instead just spend time connecting. It was intentional, important and memorable – after all, five people came together from three different states.
After lunch, we huddled in a room and talked about what we want to achieve in 2025. We got a lot done in six hours together. And today we were back on Zoom for our weekly meeting better for it.
Another good type of waiting was the kind I did for weeks in talking with a television network. More information on this come the new year. But what we’re doing at The Company of Dads – and the Lead Dads and Working Moms we do it for in the office and at home – is going to be the subject of an in-depth segment in January.
The waiting for that day was full of stress. I know from two decades as a business journalist that breaking news could scupper everything that had been planned. But when the day came, the whole shoot went better than I could have imagined.
The wait was worth it in both cases. And being together in person, better and more interesting things happened than had we all been apart.
As for the appliance repair, I’ve tried to make the best out of the waiting, but it’s impossible to do.
The kryptonite for any working parent is calendar uncertainty. If I know someone is coming at a certain time, I can plan around it. If I know that within my wait time the repair guy might actually show up, I can do thoughtful work on a project that doesn’t require me to talk to anyone. If the repair window is arbitrary? Well that’s bad waiting.
Will the oven get fixed before Christmas? No way to know. So, I’m giving up on waiting. Forget a turkey. Ham is nice but requires a working oven! So I ordered some steaks and I plan to cook them outside on Christmas Eve. Standing there I’ll know this: the wait will be worth it.
