There’s a famous scene on the show Seinfeld where the mailman Newman is explaining why postal workers “go postal.” He says:
“Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There's never a letup, It's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, but the more you get out, the more it keeps coming in. And then the bar code reader breaks. And then it's Publisher's Clearinghouse day…”
If you are in charge of a website, you may be able to relate to the never-ending nature of the job. Unlike a book, a website is never finalized. You can never sit back, prop up your feet, and say “It’s finally done.” There’s always something that should be updated, something that needs better organization or something that should be redesigned. In this sense, your site is more like a newspaper (a new issue every day) than a book. New articles need to be written and updates need to be made often or the site will become stale and out of date. How much fun is it to read a newspaper that’s a month old?
The bad news with this is there’s always something to do. The good news is there’s always something to do.
While some, like Newman, would get frustrated in an environment where the work never stops, most of us find that aspect of our jobs enjoyable. The web provides the endless opportunity for incremental improvement. You can make your site a little better each day. Fix a form. Improve the readability. Optimize for search engines. Make a function more accessible. The to-do list is endless.
And we like it that way.
Comments