Anecdote: Broken Glass and Bare Feet

One of my cats shattered a vase, the other day...and I mean shattered.

It's the worst kind of glass for that. It basically exploded. There were shares bigger than my children's' hands. There was a powder finer than sand. There was everything in between.

It's a real pain to clean something like that up, but you have to do a thorough job when you do it. I'll spare you the details of how it went and skip to the last step.

At the end of the process, I take my shoes off and place them in the sink, soles up, with the water running for a while, then leave them in the sink to dry.

This serves two purposes.

1. It cleans off the soles of my shoes, in case any errant glass found its way there.
2. It demands that my definition of done be total. I have to walk out of the kitchen (or wherever) in my bare feet.

If I'm not confident that I can walk away from a glass-break site in my bare feet, I'm not really done with the cleanup. Since the goal of cleaning up broken glass is usually to be able to walk around in my bare feet, if I do have that confidence, I must be done.

It occurred to me, as I was finishing the cleanup, that this is my perspective on most problems. Every battle is the final battle between you and the target problem. There's something about fixing a problem completely that makes it easier for me to rest at night.