By Sunday Night Your Chips Are Down For The Week

By Sunday night the week is over and all of your chips are down. The bets you have been able to place will have to bear fruit, or not.

“So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”
Bob Dylan “All along the watchtower“

Sunday Night Your Commitments Are Marked to Market

“It’s amazing how long it takes to complete something you’re not working on.”
R.D. Clyde

Sunday nights are difficult times for me. Friday night you can say, well I have another 48 hours to finish what I promised by the end of the week. But by Sunday night the week is over and all of your commitments are marked to market. Your chips are down. Whatever bets you have been able to place will have to bear fruit in the coming days to weeks.

Most of the commitments I miss are not to family or friends or clients or prospect but to myself.

Jeff Leader and I worked together in Leader-Murphy in the mid-90’s (I wish I had held on to that www.l-m.com domain name) he observed to me at the end of a particularly long work day: “You are a geyser of ideas. But we don’t need any more ideas, we need to finish this book we have started.” We never did. It was 1994 and we had a theory that corporations would use websites for internal collaboration, customer support, and real time governance and control. Sometimes you can see the future you just can’t get it down on paper. We did build more than 30 websites for firms and technical conferences in 1994-1996 but very little of what we built directly survives today.

We started SKMurphy, Inc. 11 years ago by helping two technical consulting companies find new clients: PicoCraft and New Idea Engineering. It was nuclear winter in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash and it was time to see if the could persist long enough to find the next spring. Both firms are still active today and we continue to assist them. It’s not a bad feeling to see companies that you have helped prosper.

“In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.”
Mike Monteiro in “The Chokehold of Calendars“

Related Blog Posts

• Busyness Won’t Build Your Business
• The Lucky and the Wise
• Treat Social Capital with the Same Care as Cash
• Getting Work Done: Leveraging Calendars, Task Lists, and Project Plans

Update: as of 2023 the founders of Picocraft and New Idea Engineering have all retired.