The VP Who Vacuumed His Own Office

September 5, 2026

Read Time - 5 minutes

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Recently a member of a president's cabinet told me about a friend of his, a VP on another campus, who used to come in on Mondays, before anyone else, and vacuum his own office.

Custodial services could have done it. He wanted to do it himself.

He was in the middle of a campaign, the kind measured in years, and several initiatives whose results would not show up for longer than that. The vacuum was the one thing on his Monday he controlled from start to finish.

I laughed when I heard this. Then I stopped laughing, because I realized my version of this is organizing. A friend in college told me I procrastinate by organizing things, and it took me years to admit they were right. Files, shelves, a system for the system. My desk gets cleaner as the deadline gets closer.

It feels good to do the small things.

Small things win for a reason

Karl Weick published a paper in American Psychologist in 1984 called “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” and it explains the vacuum habit better than any productivity advice I've read since.

His argument was that big problems defeat us partly because of how we've framed them. Conceived at full scale, these problems exceed what any person can hold in their head at once. So we freeze, or we go find something else to do. His prescription was to break the problem into what he called concrete, complete, implemented outcomes of moderate importance.

Read that list again: concrete, complete, implemented. That's a vacuumed office. That's an empty inbox. That's a shelf where everything faces the same way.

The pull we feel toward those things isn't a character flaw. It's the mind doing exactly what it was built to do. Most of our real work, the work that changes how a place actually operates, has no completion date. Collaborators have to weigh in. A vote has to be scheduled. A survey has to go out and come back. It can take an extraordinary amount of time to do the simplest thing, and none of it produces the small chemical receipt that finishing something produces.

Research backs up how strong that pull is. Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee documented what they named the mere urgency effect in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2018. Across five experiments, participants chose tasks with objectively worse payoffs over tasks with better ones, purely because the worse tasks carried an appearance of expiring. People preferred the thing that looked like it had an ending.

The question that separates the two

Weick was arguing for small things. He wasn't diagnosing a weakness. He was prescribing a strategy. So the question was never whether we should do small things. The question is this:

Is the small finished thing a piece of the big thing, or a substitute for it?

Vacuuming the office is not a slice of the capital campaign. Clearing the inbox is not a slice of the program review. Alphabetizing the shared drive is not a slice of the accreditation self-study.

Both feel the same from the inside, which is the whole problem. A small win and a small comfort produce identical relief. Only one of them leaves the big thing closer to finished, and until we ask the question we can't tell which one we just spent the morning on.

Three things help:

Look at what you actually finished last week. Write the list. Then mark each one: a piece of something larger, or a substitute for it. The first time I did this it was uncomfortable, in a useful way.

Give the un-finishable work a finish line anyway. If the strategic plan has no completion date, that's not a reason to leave it undefined. Pick a date three weeks out, decide what done looks like by then, and put it on the calendar as an appointment. We're not going to talk ourselves out of wanting completion, so let's decide when to go get it.

Learn your own tell. For many people it's email. Mine is organizing. The VP's was vacuuming. Yours is probably one specific activity you reach for at a predictable moment. Pay attention to the moment. It will tell you more than the activity does.

Institutions do this too

If this were only a personal habit it would be a smaller issue than it is. We run the same play at the institutional level, and there we have committees to help us do it. Institutions have their own reasons, including stakeholders that need something to look at, but the pull underneath is the same.

The institutional version of the vacuum is the deliverable. The AI policy. The strategic plan document. The task force report. The revised mission statement. The dashboard. Every one of those is concrete, complete, and implemented. Every one can be finished by a date certain and announced when it's done.

And underneath every task is a behavior: Getting faculty to change how they actually assess student work is not completable by a date. Neither is rebuilding trust in advising, or fixing a workload model that quietly breaks people. So we produce the document. The document is real work, done by people who worked hard on it. And then we mistake it for the change it was supposed to begin.

I do strategic planning work with institutions, and this is the failure we spend the most time trying to prevent. It is remarkably easy to run a good process, produce a good plan, and change nothing.

Robert Birnbaum wrote an entire book on this. In Management Fads in Higher Education he traced seven management systems through the sector since the 1960s and found the same life cycle each time: the idea arrives with a story about how much everything has changed, it generates enormous activity, and it gets adopted in rhetoric more than in practice before it quietly disappears.

Three helpful questions worth asking about any initiative on your campus right now:

1. If this succeeds, what will a specific person here be doing differently a year from now?

2. Is that person in the room where we're building it?

3. What are we going to stop doing to make room for it?

If we can't answer the first one with a name and a behavior, we're building a deliverable. That isn't a reason to cancel it. It's a reason to say out loud what it is, so nobody on the team walks away thinking the problem has been solved.

Try this before Friday

Pick the project you'd be embarrassed to admit you haven't touched since May (we all have one). Write one sentence describing what “done enough” looks like by the end of this month. Put it on your calendar as a meeting with yourself, and treat it like a meeting with your president. You can't get a completion signal from work that has no defined completion. So define one.

The Bottom Line

That VP's office was spotless every Monday. There is nothing wrong with that. The trouble starts when the clean office is the only thing we can point to at the end of the week.

We're all going to keep reaching for the finished thing. What matters is that when someone asks what we finished, our list is made of pieces rather than replacements.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading.

Put this to work on your campus.

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