Finding Zen in Circular References
Hey there - how are you doing? It’s a loaded question, but it is genuine as well. How are you?
Recently, I’ve been running myself in circles around this question. What am I really asking, and what are people asking me - how are you doing today, how are you doing right now, how are doing with this whole pandemic, how are you doing in your work, how are you doing in your life, how are you doing with your family, how are you doing…Where does the question start and where does it stop? After you answer it, does it just come back around to you again and again? Does it feel like running around in a big circle?
Circular references. In Excel, it means that you have a formula that references the same cell in which the formula was written. It can be as simple as =A1+B1 written in the cell A1:
It almost never works. Best thing to do is just start over and try again. That’s how Circular References make me feel, and that is just about how that “how are you doing” question makes me feel right about now.
Funny enough though, I’m a huge fan of circles in general. I’ve got an ouroboros tattoo on my leg and I’ve been planning an Enso tattoo for a long time. I doodle circles all day long. I actually love circles. Is there any way to view the circular reference headache from the perspective of a love of circles?
There may not be a good answer for working with circular references in Excel, but I did just write two blog posts that reference each other, so you can bounce back and forth in a circle between them if you want to:
A DIFFERENT KIND OF TOP TEN LIST FOR NONPROFIT METRICS
A JOURNEY (BACK) TO GOOGLE TASKS
In that second one, I come “full-circle” back to Google Tasks as a tool in my toolbelt for managing my inbox. Thinking about it, Circular References in Excel are actually the easiest kind of error message/mistake to deal with, because the response is almost always the same - just start over and try again. So why is that such a challenge when we are talking about our processes? Email management, task management, time management, project management...to do any of these well requires us to come up with processes, best practices, and systems that support us and give us some sense of order and direction.
If there has been anything truly highlighted for me, and many of us, in the past months it is that Change Management is a skill and tool that is absolutely necessary to survival and sanity. The better we can deal with change, the better we can exist and maybe even thrive when the whole world turns upside down. Change Management can include re-visiting old, well-worn, and sometimes thrown-out processes and tools that may be able to benefit us again under new circumstances. While that can feel somewhat burdensome at times, it can also be healing to circle back to something you’ve done or used in the past and find that it actually works for you now.
That’s where I have found zen in circular references in the past. Maybe we can find some zen in knowing that even if we have to throw out the “how are you” question for a while and find something new, we may yet be able to circle back to it in the future.
So, how are you doing?
