No doubt like many readers, I’m racing to get several things done before I go on holiday – in my case, that includes writing this column.
And the annual pre-holiday crunch makes for an even more excruciating to-do list than usual. But it was Pope Leo, of all people, who made me acknowledge that a hard cut-off for work projects is really a blessing in disguise.
The pontiff was on a visit to Barcelona this summer, where he gave a papal benediction to the Sagrada Família, architect Antoni Gaudí’s bizarre modernist sand-sculpture cathedral, which remains unfinished 100 years after his death in 1926.
A century on, and with a large mosaic cross now erected on the tallest tower, Pope Leo decided it was finally time to mark a near-concluding moment in this monumental construction project. Hence the special Mass for the final and tallest tower’s completion.
READ MORE
Gaudí said of his crazy and elaborate vision, creeping upward at glacial pace even in his lifetime, that the client – by which he meant God – was “not in a hurry”.
I do not think my editors feel the same way about me leaving them with a big salmon-pink unfilled space in the Financial Times – news people are born with a sense of urgency. Nor will readers’ bosses be likely to embrace the idea that, like the Almighty, they should have a bit of patience if pre-holiday tasks get held up between commission and delivery. We probably can’t count on a blessing for our unfinished business either. But the pope’s decision to officiate at the cathedral while the scaffolding was still up gave me hope: yes, struggling with a work in progress can feel awful, and a lot of us don’t know when to draw a line under something. But sometimes that’s just what you have to do – make it the best you possibly can in the time available.
Hence the joy of the deadline, a huge luxury which we enjoy several times a day in the media. The point at which each piece of work must exit the building (literally, if it has to go to the printers) is non-negotiable. Journalists were saying “just do it” to each other long before Nike adopted the slogan. And by and large, it means that while we have projects on the go, we aren’t drowning in unfinished business. Hallelujah!
What size does your pension actually need to be for a comfortable retirement?
Compare and contrast with, say, the agonised PhD candidates spending years working their way to completion. I know plenty who gave up, although I was impressed to find out that the UK non-completion rate is actually only 16.2 per cent – good job the rest of you. The closest I can get to imagining the psychological burden of such a long-term project is perhaps an architect spending decades on a plan for an unfinished cathedral if he or she lacked Gaudí’s intense religious faith (the Vatican has put him on a path to sainthood).
Each article cannot be a masterpiece. Nor can each piece of work by most of us in the desk-jockey, white-collar worker category. We are not building cathedrals here, or writing the Great American Novel. But our work can be efficiently delivered to a standard we can be proud of. I suppose we are just creating the equivalent of the damp-drip sandcastle tributes to the Sagrada Família scattered across the beaches of the Costa Brava.
So yes, make like the swoosh and just do it. Invent a firm deadline if you don’t have a real one, or, if you want something a little more literary, be guided by Franz Kafka, who wrote: “From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
You might say that Pope Leo, in his wisdom, felt that Barcelona’s great monument has reached that lofty point with the topping off of its final tower this year. Or that I, wondering how to conclude this column, might even be reaching my own point of no turning back. It feels good, I must say, and I’m grateful for the work and to the editor who asked me again earlier today to please cough up the requisite number of words before she and I could be free to take our family holidays.
If you can just manage to hit one deadline at a time, then that unholy to-do list will be finished in much less than 100 years. Just don’t expect sainthood for it.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
