He Fa on the Progress-Bar Carrier

Five progress-bar compartments cross my belly: deep blue, turquoise, lemon yellow and orange-red lead to blank grey. Thin cream sleeves hang in front; short orange-red legs and blue shoes support the bar. What draws attention is not what I have done, but the one compartment still empty. A visible vacancy quickly governs judgement of all the work.

A progress bar compresses a long process into an easily understood sequence, and I acknowledge its help to those waiting. Yet compartments require a predetermined total, while the goal may not be fully clear at the start. If the direction proves wrong midway, filling another compartment raises the completion rate while moving the actual result farther from what is needed. Numerical smoothness cannot testify for the goal.

The bar makes my body very wide, but my hands do not grip its ends as though carrying freight. I am wearing this way of measuring. A metric does not merely report labour; it may alter labour’s posture, encouraging easy-to-colour parts first and postponing hard-to-measure corrections. The final compartment can drag the whole person along without explaining what the first four solved.

I do not want to abolish progress displays and leave others waiting indefinitely. We can report completed parts and explain that what remains is not an equal-sized share. A changed standard should be stated. An already usable result need not acquire meaningless steps merely to fill the picture. Visibility should help shared judgement, not lock work into a story that can move only rightwards.

The grey compartment remains recessed. Before colouring it, I will check when I can put this horizontal object down. Afterwards there should be something usable on the ground, not merely one less anxiety-provoking patch of grey.