Pride in Work?

As I was pushing through my pile of things to do at work, I had one of those occasional moments of questioning exactly what I was doing.

I spent the whole day more less attending to different tasks - e-mails, follow ups, setting meetings, preparing for upcoming visits, catching up.  At the end of the day I looked to my desk and my in-box and found that just by viewing those two metrics, you would be hard pressed to tell that I accomplished anything at all at work.

I think this is one of the more frustrating aspects of what I do:  it is very hard to point to something and say "Behold what I have done". The fact is that most of this hardly exists except as a electrons and physical sheets of paper that are moved, reviewed, signed and filed in a vacuum that seldom if ever see the light of day.

There is no "finish line"; no point at which the building is complete or the book is finished or the artwork completed.  Seldom, too, is there the ability to go back later and be able to point out to anyone what you have accomplished.  The accomplishments dwell mostly in the mind and on hard drives and in paper files that exist only to be filed away and destroyed at some later date.

We are taught that we should take pride in our work - but when your work is essential invisible, inaudible, and transient, it becomes very difficult indeed.