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I’ll admit it.  I cut out of work a bit early Monday.  As I write this from my little home office in Cleveland (home of the May snowstorm), I’m looking out upon a bit of snow or sleet or something similarly unpleasant as it cascades from slate-gray skies.  There are many reasons to love Cleveland, believe it or not.  The weather is not one of them.

But on this particular Monday, it was about 70 degrees and sunny here in Northeast Ohio.  After about 125 consecutive days of snow, sleet and cloud, a day like this was more than just a treat.  Even better, THIS particular Monday happened to be Opening Day for major league baseball.

Now those who know me (and even many who don’t) know that I can talk for hours.  About nothing.  But those who know me best know I can talk baseball for even longer.  So, for me, Opening Day is always a special event.  I just love the game.

But it seems to me that the opening of baseball season is a Very Big Deal (forgoing the opportunity to use yet another Joe Biden reference here) to many in the United States.  I’d even go so far as to say that it’s bigger than NBA’s opening night or the NFL’s opener—even though both sports are, overall, more popular.  Why is that?

I’m going to take a stab at it.  Yes, it has much to do with spring.  Here in the Midwest, we treasure our 2 – 3 months of warmth and sunshine.  But the crowds also turn out in Florida, Texas and California for Opening Day, where, presumably, the coming of spring doesn’t look that different from the coming of fall, winter or summer (more or less). So the weather can’t be the only reason.

No, I’d posit that Opening Day, increasingly so in the day and age of the smart phone and Total Connectedness to the rest of the world, is an opportunity to revel in uni-tasking.

You see, our business culture, aided by technology and lean operations, has come to a point where most of us have little time to pay attention to much of anything we’re doing these days.  We’re making appointments, sitting on conference calls and editing documents simultaneously because we have to.  There’s just no time, you see.  In fact, I wish I had a nickel for every time I’d heard a harried professional confide that he or she wondered when there would actually be time to get the work done—having spent so much time in meetings and on conference calls.

Indeed, we spend so much time scheduling our work, talking about our work, delegating our work and rearranging our work that there’s very little time to “sift through the bad ideas,” as an old boss of mine used to say.  How often do you find you get a bit of time to brainstorm, or just think?  Not daydream or fantasize about vacation or a new job.  But to really just sit, uninterrupted by a stream of e-mails, texts and IMs, and just focus on what might really be the best way to reach a business goal?  You see, I’d suggest that there are times when we “milestone” or “interim goal” our way out of the big picture.  And, as a result, the end product suffers.

And so, dear reader (or readers—hi Mom!), my theory today is that many of us who enjoy Opening Day come from the business world.  In fact, many who don’t even know the difference between a safety squeeze and a free safety (bonus points if you can guess which term doesn’t belong in a baseball conversation!) seem to enjoy Opening Day.  And I believe they do so because it’s a chance to focus, or even pretend to focus, on just one thing for longer than 30 seconds.  It’s sunshine (in some places), warmth, the smell of freshly-cut grass and, if you’re so inclined, beer.  More importantly, it gives us a legitimate excuse to not insanely multi-task for 3 hours.  After all, we’re at or watching a baseball game.

Could there be a lesson in there for American business?  ‘Dunno.  I’ll let you figure it out.