Two Weeks Covering

Jonas agreed to cover for Beatrix for two weeks in April. He had said yes quickly, because the work looked simple from the outside: answer what comes in, pass on what does not belong to you, keep the list up to date.

On the first morning he opened her list and found ninety open items. Forty of them were older than a year. None of them was urgent, and all of them were somebody's problem. He understood within an hour why she never left before seven.

By the third day he had stopped trying to finish anything. He was doing what she did instead: reading the whole list every morning, moving four or five things forward, and remembering which of the ninety would become urgent that week.

The difficult part was not the work. It was that nobody could see it. When he handed over on the Friday, the list still had eighty-eight items on it, and two people asked him whether the fortnight had been quiet.

Beatrix came back and looked at the list for about a minute. "You moved the supplier thing," she said. "Thank you. I have been trying to move that since January." Then she made coffee for both of them and started reading from the top.