If you spend much time on the Internet — and seeing where this column is posted each week, I’m guessing you do — you’ve probably seen the acronym TL;DR out there. Hmm. Is it still called an acronym if it includes punctuation? Deep thoughts. Okay, back to the point. TL;DR stands for “too long; didn’t read” and is often placed in the comments of lengthy articles, columns, blog posts, and other missives as a means of conveying, basically, “I’m sure what you’re saying is something I should pay attention to — I mean, I’m here, right — but man, could you get this more tweet-length so I can weigh in with an opinion?”

There’s a whole bunch of TL;DR going on out there and it may be generational to some extent, but even I — a gal who loves reading pages and pages of TOS before mindlessly hitting “agree” at social networking sites — find myself glazing over after too many words on a page, knowing there’s good stuff there for me, but, oof, I have so much else I should be doing, y’know?

We’ve all been there. We talk about the movie as if we saw it when all we saw was the trailer and a few reviews. We read the book jacket and thumb through it and feel like we can speak about the whole book, even though it’s just taking up space on our bookshelf. It’s just a thing. It doesn’t make us bad people.

I was really thinking about this when it was time to vote for the Emmys earlier this year. As a first-time Emmy voter, I was taking this whole thing very seriously (as seriously as I take the kind of voting that yields a free sticker). Just like I read up on all the candidates and ballot measures, I was watching *everything* and not just the cool trailers that were submitted to the FYC library, but whole episodes, whole seasons — I was going to be an honor roll student when it came to how much viewing I did to be sure a show deserved my vote.

And then I realized how much I was caring (a lot) and how much other voters may care (anywhere from a lot to not at all) and, further, how many potential voters may not even vote at all. It’s all really fascinating to me, as I consider how much passion goes into something that may boil down to an item in the TL;DR category for most consumers.

What, in your life, are you TL;DR-ing? What, when it comes to your career, could you be investing more time into — because it is so dang important — even if it’s exhausting or hard work or even tedious? As we head into the end of this glorgious* year, take stock of what you’re half-assing and make a commitment to do better. Even just a little bit better. Incremental progress in an iterative process is huge over the long haul.

And if you need a boost from the outside to help you get there, enroll in my free inbox training series Get in Gear for the New Year. I’ll help you push forward, faster, with daily tasks for the last 11 days of 2014. Yes, while everyone else is taking a break, we’re tier-jumping. The timing is perfect!

*I keep typing glorgious when I mean a combination of glorious and gorgeous and I’m pretty sure I just want to create that word: Glorgious. So, there it is. Let’s have a glorgious end to 2014 together! 🙂

Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!

Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001908.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.