فصل 26

Part Seven - Six Ways to Prevent Fatigue And Worry and Keep Your Energy and Spirits High

Chapter 26 - Four Good Working Habits That Will Help Prevent Fatigue and Worry

Good Working Habit No. 1: Clear Your Desk of All Papers Except Those Relating to the Immediate Problem at Hand.

Roland L. Williams, President of Chicago and North, western Railway, says: “A person with his desk piled high with papers on various matters will find his work much easier and more accurate if he clears that desk of all but the immediate problem on hand. I call this good housekeeping, and it is the number, one step towards efficiency.”

If you visit the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., you will find five words painted on the ceiling, five words written by the poet Pope:

“Order is Heaven’s first law.”

Order ought to be the first law of business, too. But is it? No, the average business man’s desk is cluttered up with papers that he hasn’t looked at for weeks. In fact, the publisher of a New Orleans newspaper once told me that his secretary cleared up one of his desks and found a typewriter that had been missing for two years!

The mere sight of a desk littered with unanswered mail and reports and memos is enough to breed confusion, tension, and worries. It is much worse than that. The constant reminder of “a million things to do and no time to do them” can worry you not only into tension and fatigue, but it can also worry you into high blood pressure, heart trouble, and stomach ulcers.

Dr. John H. Stokes, professor, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, read a paper before the National Convention of the American Medical Association, a paper entitled “Functional Neuroses as Complications of Organic Disease”. In that paper, Dr. Stokes listed eleven conditions under the title: “What to Look for in the Patient’s State of Mind”. Here is the first item on that list:

“The sense of must or obligation; the unending stretch of things ahead that simply have to be done.”

But how can such an elementary procedure as clearing your desk and making decisions help you avoid this high pressure, this sense of must, this sense of an “unending stretch of things ahead that simply have to be done?” Dr. William L. Sadler, the famous psychiatrist, tells of a patient who, by using this simple device, avoided a nervous breakdown. The man was an executive in a big Chicago firm. When he came to Dr. Sadler’s office, he was tense, nervous, worried. He knew he was heading for a tailspin, but he couldn’t quit work. He had to have help.

“While this man was telling me his story,” Dr. Sadler says, “my telephone rang. It was the hospital calling; and, instead of deferring the matter, I took time right then to come to a decision. I always settle questions, if possible, right on the spot. I had no sooner hung up than the phone rang again. Again an urgent matter, which I took time to discuss. The third interruption came when a colleague of mine came to my office for advice on a patient who was critically ill. When I had finished with him, I turned to my caller and began to apologize for keeping him waiting. But he had brightened up. He had a completely different look on his face.”

“Don’t apologize, doctor!” this man said to Sadler. “In the last ten minutes, I think I’ve got a hunch as to what is wrong with me. I’m going back to my offices and revise my working habits. But before I go, do you mind if I take a look in your desk?”

Dr. Sadler opened up the drawers of his desk. All empty, except for supplies. “Tell me,” said the patient, “where do you keep your unfinished business?”

“Finished!” said Sadler.

“And where do you keep your unanswered mail?”

“Answered!” Sadler told him. “My rule is never to lay down a letter until I have answered it. I dictate the reply to my secretary at once.”

Six weeks later, this same executive invited Dr. Sadler to come to his office. He was changed and so was his desk. He opened the desk drawers to show there was no unfinished business inside of the desk. “Six weeks ago,” this executive said, “I had three different desks in two different offices and was snowed under by my work. I was never finished. After talking to you, I came back here and cleared out a wagon, load of reports and old papers. Now I work at one desk, settle things as they come up, and don’t have a mountain of unfinished business nagging at me and making me tense and worried. But the most astonishing thing is I’ve recovered completely. There is nothing wrong any more with my health!”

Charles Evans Hughes, former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said: “Men do not die from overwork. They die from dissipation and worry.” Yes, from dissipation of their energies and worry because they never seem to get their work done.

Good Working Habit No. 2: Do Things in the Order of Their Importance.

Henry L. Dougherty, founder of the nation, wide Cities Service Company, said that regardless of how much salary he paid, there were two abilities he found it almost impossible to find.

Those two priceless abilities are: first, the ability to think. Second, the ability to do things in the order of their importance.

Charles Luckman, the lad who started from scratch and climbed in twelve years to president of the Pepsodent Company, got a salary of a hundred thousand dollars a year, and made a million dollars besides that lad declares that he owes much of his success to developing the two abilities that Henry L. Dougherty said he found almost impossible to find. Charles Luckman said: “As far back as I can remember, I have got up at five o’clock in the morning because I can think better then than any other time, I can think better then and plan my day, plan to do things in the order of their importance.” Franklin Bettger, one of America’s most successful insurance salesmen, doesn’t wait until five o’clock in the morning to plan his day. He plans it the night before, sets a goal for himself, a goal to sell a certain amount of insurance that day. If he fails, that amount is added to the next day and so on.

I know from long experience that one is not always able to do things in the order of their importance, but I also know that some kind of plan to do first things first is infinitely better than extemporizing as you go along.

If George Bernard Shaw had not made it a rigid rule to do first things first, he would probably have failed as a writer and might have remained a bank cashier all his life. His plan called for writing five pages each day. That plan and his dogged determination to carry it through saved him. That plan inspired him to go right on writing five pages a day for nine heartbreaking years, even though he made a total of only thirty dollars in those nine years, about a penny a day.

Good Working Habit No. 3. When You Face a Problem, Solve It Then and There if You Have the Facts Necessary to Make a Decision. Don’t Keep Putting off Decisions.

One of my former students, the late H.P. Howell, told me that when he was a member of the board of directors of U.S. Steel, the meetings of the board were often long drawn out affairs, many problems were discussed, few decisions were made. The result: each member of the board had to carry home bundles of reports to study.

Finally, Mr. Howell persuaded the board of directors to take up one problem at a time and come to a decision. No procrastination, no putting off. The decision might be to ask for additional facts; it might be to do something or do nothing. But a decision was reached on each problem before passing on to the next. Mr. Howell told me that the results were striking and salutary: the docket was cleared. The calendar was clean. No longer was it necessary for each member to carry home a bundle of reports. No longer was there a worried sense of unresolved problems.

A good rule, not only for the board of directors of U.S. Steel, but for you and me.

Good Working Habit No. 4: Learn to Organize, Deputize, and Supervise.

Many a business man is driving himself to a premature grave because he has never learned to delegate responsibility to others, insists on doing everything himself. Result: details and confusion overwhelm him. He is driven by a sense of hurry, worry, anxiety, and tension. It is hard to learn to delegate responsibilities. I know. It was hard for me, awfully hard. I also know from experience the disasters that can be caused by delegating authority to the wrong people. But difficult as it is to delegate authority, the executive must do it if he is to avoid worry, tension, and fatigue.

The man who builds up a big business, and doesn’t learn to organize, deputize, and supervise, usually pops off with heart trouble in his fifties or early sixties, heart trouble caused by tension and worries. Want a specific instance? Look at the death notices in your local paper.