Rural Heritage August/September 2025

old workhorse as a training teammate to hitch your excitable young trainee to, and while there, you see a beautiful Clydesdale yearling—and you’ve always wanted a Clydesdale! It feels like a perfect opportunity! Take a serious pause: is this really a project that you can take on right now? What happens to your other horse in training? There’s only so much time in a day. Can you really use this new opportunity? A related issue is adding extra tasks while it’s convenient. You might decide to do additional errands on your trip to town. Or go to the hardware store for supplies for one project and decide to also pick up materials for another. Sometimes this is efficient—saving fuel or time by not doing multiple town trips. Sometimes it leads you astray, distracting you and dissipating efforts. Trying to get too many things done in one trip might take so long that you run out of time to do the originally planned project. Stocking up for your next project before taking the time to plan it carefully, might mean going to the hardware store again anyway. And when you start a project related to the first because you’re already at it —a time-management technique known as “time batching”—sometimes you fail to finish anything. This is not to suggest that you should never take on side projects or group your errands—only that you should pause to consider how they affect progress toward your main goal.

Two. Do what needs to be done—rise to the challenge. When you see a job that needs doing, who better to do it? Unless there’s someone to delegate it to— someone who really should be doing it—step up to the plate yourself. Sometimes a job might seem impossible. But if it’s something that needs to be done, push yourself to do it. You’ll figure out a way. Ask for help along the way if you need it. If you’re new to training a team, find an experienced teamster to work with at first. If you’re not a mechanic, find some instructional videos to guide you on that chainsaw or tractor repair. When you put your mind to it, you can do more than you ever thought possible. Three. Every job will take longer than you think—and you need to do what it takes to get it done. How many times have you started that job that will “just take two hours,” only to find yourself still working on it two days later? Some people estimate time well, but for many of us, the inner optimist overlooks the project’s magnitude or forgets key steps and thinks it will be simpler than it is. I multiply my time estimates by three or four, which usually gets it about right. If it’s taking longer than expected, and the job is worth doing, take the time to get it done. For example, if you want your team trained and ready to pull farm implements, and you’ve estimated you might do that in three weeks, you might find that it actually takes two or three months. Keep at it until you get there. Four. Beware adventitious opportunity. Maybe you’ve gone to a horse auction to pick up a steady,

Five. Making do—or doing well? My dad passed along the attitude that “a job worth doing is worth doing well.” While that’s often true, he also demonstrated that sometimes you just have to do a quick repair until you have time or materials to do the job well. The key is to step back and reflect: Is

August/September 2025

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