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301. One Week's Work in One Day

Work is done by several people in several fashions. People working in a sluggish organisation visiting alert companies often find that there the work is done quicker. What they do in a month gets done here in a day or two. They are all appreciation. It stops there. No attempt is made to know how the work was done quickly. You may have seen uneducated people, or less educated persons trying to write down the monthly accounts. They take a whole day. While doing it, they perspire. It is a work of half an hour to an educated person. A graduate in an office was trying to draft a reply to a routine letter of ten sentences. He wrote it down ten times and spent a full hour on it. Obviously he had no skill and language was a bother. Still, is it humanly possible to do seven days of work in one day?

The value of a programme can be best appreciated by the CEOs of companies. They attend seminars paying a fee of Rs. 25,000/-. There are two parts in the scheme. The first is elimination of waste, alertness, memory, presence of mind, unruffled temper, organised work, etc. One who is unorganised and sluggish will double his efficiency by doing all these. Maybe he will treble it. That is the smaller part of it. A Dutch girl was in tears when she was given a 50-hour work in a 40-hour week. A colleague consoled her and tried to help her. The first thing he asked her was to write down all the work and post the shortest time it needed next to it. She did that. It totalled 27 hours. She was all smiles. Our work is not time consuming. Our way of doing it is.

CEO's are efficient. They do not commit such lapses. The second part of the programme is to upgrade the idea behind the organisation of work. Here we can only mention the principle, not offer a detailed explanation accompanied by a striking example. The secret lies in the fact that we LOVE what we do as we are efficient in doing it. Instead of attending to the details, one should take care of its essence. Capacity to move away from the love of details to the significance of the essence enables one to do in one day the work of seven days. The basic contradiction lies in the fact that efficiency is attention to details. It is possible for us to take care of the essence without losing hold of the details. Learning to do it requires the discussion of an actual work. No question need be raised as to its possibility, as the people above us are already doing it. It is not a knotty problem, but a subtle tangle one needs to undo with penetration.



story | by Dr. Radut