Building something, anything...

Photo notes: Created from starryai with the prompt “build something, anything…”

I was up until nearly midnight last night. I was building a wall in my barn. My wife and I (mostly my wife, she’s the brains behind it) have a small horse boarding business on our property. It is a continual work in progress. We make tiny incremental improvements in how we do things. From how to fill water troughs and hay bags to how we store equipment , it is an iterative process.

Case in point we have a barn that hasn’t been used to it’s potential for a while. We started building out a tack room for our boarders a while back and this past weekend finally put the “finishing” touches on it. That led to how do we divide off our area of the barn from where the boarders will access…and hence a wall needed to be built.

I consider myself pretty handy when it comes to building things. I may not be the best, and I may not be quick, but I typically can get things built if I take the time and watch a TON of youtube videos.

For this wall we decided to put in a stall wall (picture below) with a sliding door. I worked on it until about 11pm last night and cleaned up went to the house ate some food, showered, and fell asleep around midnight. The wall isn’t quite done but it is close. It is not perfect nor pretty, but it will get the job done and I am proud of it.

However, every story needs a lesson and my lesson here is I was so focused on getting this wall built I made a huge error in another area. Well, not so much an error as a forgetful lapse of memory. I forgot to turn off the water to our pond and woke up this morning to a phone call that it had overflowed over night and flooded part of the area by our barn. I rushed out, turned the water off, and inspected the damage. Luckily it was limited and it is just water and it will dry up.

So what was my lesson? Focusing on one thing is important, but not getting so myopic that you miss the bigger picture is equally important. I walked right past the pond last night at 11pm and surely saw it was full and could have turned the water off then. I had the thought earlier in the day that I needed to not forget to turn the water off and could have set a reminder or alarm on my phone, I didn’t…I thought I would remember…I didn’t. If I had just taken a step back and looked at things from a different frame of reference before ending my day I likely would have remembered that simple task of closing a valve that takes 10 second.

Take a step back, look at the big picture and don’t hyper focus. And surely don’t multi-task, it’s not real and it’s silly.