When your work ends, what begins?

I’m calling myself out here.

I just finished a piece of work. It’s something I’ve been procrastinating on a little, I admit. It’s one of those ‘not so many words’, but ‘quite a lot of thinking’ things that has seen me keen to mark it off as finished, even though that’s harder than I first thought to do.

So what did I do when it was done? Triumphantly sent it straight off to the colleague I’m working with to do the next stage. I hit send quickly before I packed my stuff up and dashed off to get the train home.

I didn’t think that my small triumph at sending it off at seven minutes past five was quite possibly going to create completely the opposite feeling in my colleague. I dash off home feeling accomplishment, they get a big task appearing in their inbox just as they were about to leave. They can do it tomorrow, but that’s not the point, I’ve implied something unintentionally by sending it out when I did.

It’s made me think, so often when your work ends someone else’s begins. It’s probably best to think less about how you feel about passing it on, and more about how they feel about it being passed on to them.

Originally published at Oliver Quinlan.