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No time for clock in a barn

There is no clock in the barn. Or, if there is, it’s probably wrong because who remembers to take care of the clock in the barn?

There is a reason there is no clock in the barn. The barn is for things that need doing, not things that you can pause at an arbitrary moment.

When you are welding up a gate or fixing the planetary gears that go inside the hubs of a rather large tractor, you can’t drop what you are doing — literally or figuratively.

Indeed, it is equally as difficult to gauge how long it will take at any point before the project is complete. Inevitably, your estimate will be wrong. That really hard job that you’ve been putting off for a long while? It’ll be much quicker than you thought. That simple oil change that’ll only take you an hour or two? You can laugh about it in a couple of days.

There are important times in the barn.

There is time to eat. Either the first intersection of hunger, empty hands, and nothing being on fire … or, when somebody shows up with food.

There is time to sleep, which is more difficult to pin down, but somehow, approximately once a day, you find a pause-point in the project and take a few hours to recharge. Or, more often the case, you work until you realize that you can’t go any further without some part, tool, or supply that you don’t have, no one you know within a few miles has, and can only be gotten at some place that isn’t available until tomorrow.

But all the time spent in the barn isn’t work and it’s the lack of a timepiece that is equally important in those cases. Barn party? Time isn’t important once you arrive. A game of pool with your sister? A movie projected up on the wall? An old car that you only work on for fun? There are lots of fun things to do in the barn and the best part of having fun in the barn is that there is no clock telling when to stop.

Work hard, play hard, and don’t put a clock in the barn.

Audra Brown doesn’t clock in, she just clocks off. Contact her at: [email protected]

 
 
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