Here is a list of techniques to help you avoid getting down to productive work, the effort it requires, and the stresses it causes. These are the rules for "playing office":
- Morning start-up coffee, preferably with sweet rolls and conversation. Multiple trips to the coffee source during the day, with conversations more or less related to the work at hand.
- Busy work: Rearrange your papers. Rearrange your office tools. Get up and get a fresh pad of paper or anything.
- Read something unnecessary.
- Try something new on your computer terminal.
- Discuss something unrelated to the work at hand, such as how the company should be run, or the country.
- Write an unnecessary memo and discuss its typing and distribution, at length, with the secretary.
- Make a photocopy of something.
- Hold a meeting about anything. Discuss everything in the meeting.
- Work on the easiest part of the job first, and save the serious problems for last.
- Make arrangements for lunch.
- Be serious and careful with administrative paper: time cards, expense reports, requisitions, work orders, etc. Do not delegate filling out forms to secretaries, drafters, technicians, or other assistants; this work is too important to be done by anyone other than yourself. If your company is suitably organized, you can spend most of your time in this activity, fritter away very little time producing actual engineering, and qualify yourself as good management material.
- Remember the basic rule of work time: to accomplish 1 hour of solid work takes between 90 minutes and 3 years, depending on what the worker considers more important.
If you really want to produce a lot of engineering as your path to success, below are a few suggestions:
- Spend a small amount of time in planning your time. Use PERT charts or other scheduling charts, but remember that they are to help you work; they are not the work you do.
- Decide priorities and follow them.
- Devise rules and habits to avoid the avoidance techniques listed above, and practice quiet self-discipline to make these rules and habits work.
- Plan on paper and review your own performance.
- Make checklists and check off the items.
- Get one of the many commercial record forms and planning calendars you can buy to help you, but remember that they help only if you use them:
- Month-At-A -Glance
- Week-At-A -Glance
- Day-At-A -Glance
- Day-Timers
- Delegate. This is easy to say but hard to do successfully. The keys are your judgment of the delegatee's competence and diligence and your ability to persuade him or her to perform. If the delegatee is successful, you have delegated well, by definition. If the delegatee is unsuccessful, you have delegated improperly, by definition. Lots of luck!
- Do the unpleasant tasks first. Then you won't procrastinate, to your disadvantage, and besides you will feel virtuous.
- Be neat. Visitors will be given a feeling of confidence. In a laboratory and in a shop, safety to people and to equipment is greater with good housekeeping.
Secretaries
Try very hard to get and keep a good secretary. A secretary who takes filing and neatness seriously, is courteous and tactful to others than yourself, who is bright and energetic, and who wants to be helpful is an absolute blessing. Such a secretary is an assistant, not a clerk.
As a new hire right out of school you will wait hat in hand to get a secretary to type a letter. When you get to be a big wheel, you will have a secretary all your own. In between you get some share of secretarial attention. The other face of that coin is that you should treat secretaries as VDPs and earn their goodwill. A secretary who does not like you is a bad enemy, especially one who is the secretary to your boss or someone else important to you. Try to make up. If you cannot, let the secretary's boss know of the hostility so that he or she can discount the things the secretary will say.
Allocating Your Time
In planning your time remember that thinking is working. Do not feel guilty if you are physically immobile and are not spreading ink and graphite over paper or electrons over a fluorescent screen. A knowing supervisor of a good engineer is delighted to see the engineer with feet on the desk and a scowl on the face. On the other hand, if you work for the Bull-of-the-Woods, learn to think while bent over a desk with a pencil in your unmoving hand.
Remember that you are using your time competitively with someone else using his or hers, whether inside your own company or inside a competitive company. Whichever competitor uses time more efficiently will get a payoff. Alexander Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray to the Patent Office by only a few hours and was awarded the basic telephone patent because he did.
You will always have competing demands on your time from your job, your continuing education, your family and social life, your civic affairs, your exercise, and your rest and recreation. The ancient Greek concept of the golden mean suggests that you allocate a "reasonable" portion of your time to each. On the other hand, some people are driven to put business and professional success ahead of everything else.
