Planting trees, revisited.

Today my Godson came by to work for me again.  I was surprised that he still wanted to work for me after the tiring day of planting last week.  Last Tuesday we planted 140 trees, today’s goal was 200 trees.  We started off with a head of steam, but by lunch time we only had about 70 trees planted.  It did not look good for us to reach our goal.  So, after lunch I tried two different strategies.  First I told him that I could unload the van of the 70 trees, before he could plant a row of 17 trees.  Now If I were planting the trees, it would take me about 5 minutes.  I was counting on it taking him about 15 minutes, because that is how long that I thought it would take me to unload the van.  We both finished at the same time in about 12 minutes.  He just did not want to be beat by me.  After digging a few holes, we started planting.  We were now on a quicker pace, but he was beginning to slow down.  Now for strategy number two, bribery.  I told him that if we planted the remaining trees in an hour, we would be finished before his allotted time and we could go get a frozen yogurt before his Dad came by to pick him up.  Well, it worked and he started to plant like a mad man.  We planted about 160 trees in the same amount of time that it took us to plant 140 trees last week and we went and got frozen yogurt.  He decided on a root beer float instead.  We were both very tired, but I got a lot of work done that I would have had to do by myself.  I also learned that my motivational skills are still intact.

Categorised in: Uncategorized

This post was written by George