As much as I enjoy a hobby, there comes a time when there must be administration. When people think hobbies, many of them (me included) visualize simply the joy of enjoying the fruits of the labors.
Take, for example, my goal for a comic book library. I dream of one day having an ultimate comic book library in my basement or a side room somewhere. When I think of my comic book collection, this is what I visualize—that is the dream. The reality is the monthly inventory—that I’m behind on. I think of all of the holes in the collection I must fill. I think of the constant organizing that I must conduct. There is much more to maintaining a good hobby that simply enjoying the fruits.
Some of the other hobby administration that I must conduct are Baseball Cards cataloging—baseball cards are great until you have no idea what you have in your collection, ancestry research data input—it is fun to research but not always fun to write it all down, and finally, photo files to organize—everything now has a computer data base, but now after about fifteen years of putting stuff on the computer, my files are a mess.
It goes to show that nothing worth having is without administrative features. Even our hobbies have tedious work that simply must be done to make the hobby function well. The best collections, the best genealogies, the best photo databases make the most enjoyable hobbies what they are.
The question, then, is “Why do we expect our work to be any different?”
(Photo: unsplash.com)