Tuesday Work

When it happens, it will be on a Tuesday.

This is unfortunate, because "Tuesday" is somewhat of a dirty word around teachers in my building. Generally speaking, if something is going to go wrong at school, it's going to be on a Tuesday. For Tuesday is "staff development day." Our day begins earlier than all others days in order to provide time for us to be "developed." Whether valuable or not, these meetings are typically viewed as obstacles to the mounting papers to grade, copies to be made, notes to prepare, or students to help. Any day that begins with built-in obstacles has the right ingredients for disaster. Or at least a sub-par day. And it seems I've had my fair share of those kind of Tuesdays.

It is with this attitude that I approach the concept of "Tuesday work" in this post. It's another idea I came across in the Exploring Calvin and Hobbes collection that I wrote about a few weeks ago. For it was his work on the average Tuesday that Bill Watterson, writer of the Calvin and Hobbes strip, felt he would ultimately be judged.

Said Watterson:

"Comic strips are so ephemeral that daily consistency is sort of the test. You might get lucky and knock one out of the park on Monday, but that doesn't buy you much credit for Tuesday. Everybody's already forgotten it. The measure of a comic is those "Tuesday strips," where you don't hit it out of the park. Proportionally those are going to be the vast majority of your work, so how good are they?"

When I say that it will happen on a Tuesday, this is what I mean. It will be on the Tuesdays of your life, on the days you don't feel great, on the days when life is not going according to plan, on the days after a masterful performance when you're tired and you feel like you've given enough already, that you will build your reputation. You will be remembered for your Tuesdays.

I want my kids to remember their childhood for the great trips we've taken or the Christmas mornings we've planned. And they'll remember some of that. But they'll remember more how I father on the other days, the unplanned and unscheduled days, the days where I choose between time with them or time to myself, when we do nothing special other than eat a meal and read a book and kick a ball in the yard.

I want my students to remember me for the great lessons, my players for the great wins, my fellow church members for the strong sermons, and my readers for the most-read posts. But they will not. Not primarily, any way. Rather, it will be for who I am and what I do in the days in between.

You will build your reputation on a thousand Tuesdays, all stacked up one after another, none of them memorable but all of them influential. What will those stack of Tuesdays build? A mountain of forgettable days? Perhaps. But more likely, they will form a complete and accurate picture of you. Unfiltered, unplanned, unprotected you. How good are you when you're not "knocking it out of the park," as Watterson said?

Whatever you want to be good at, whether it be prayer or politics, will be tested on Tuesdays. More importantly, whoever you want to be, especially to the people you most want to be that for, will be determined by how you spoke to them, how you showed up for them, or how you served them when you didn't have it on the calendar.

Claim Tuesdays as yours. Win them all. Not by being fantastic and unforgettable, but by quietly and doggedly being exactly who you want to be.