It can be done very simply. Just a sheet of paper ruled in small squares—you can buy it at any stationer's—on which to fill in the steps you must take in between what you have to do and what you seek to accomplish by it—and some careful thought as to just what your job is and why it is to be done, will develop a true ANALYSIS of your problems which will beat reams and reams of typewritten words.
Remember the words of the Chinese philosopher: "A picture is worth ten thousand words"—and reflect how clever these Chinese are!
The MEANS FOR ACCOMPLISHING the final objective may be many or few. You have seen the cafeteria-manager's problems on the chart on [page 24]. Now turn to [page 35] and see what a file clerk does beside powder her nose from nine to five.
A bright young lady fresh out of high school went to work in an editorial office. There wasn't enough filing to do to keep her happy from nine to five, so she filled in with a bit of typing here and a trifle of routine clerical work there. Thursdays she hopped over to the neighboring bookstore and collected Saturday Posts for the editors—now she'll have to do that on Tuesday. And Fridays she distributed The New Yorkers to avid readers.
Filing, though, was her main job. When she first came, the managing editor said "Here it is" or words to that effect, and she went to work.
Those files had always been more or less of a sore point. An editor's mail is nothing if not voluminous. And every day Flossie the fascinating file clerk got a mass of data which she had to stick away. Her great trouble was finding it again after she'd stuck it away.
Often she couldn't find it. And pretty soon she discovered that she got the blame no matter what was missing—whether an important inquiry from Peter B. Stilb or the editor's pipe cleaners.
She couldn't do a thing about the pipe cleaners, but she made up her mind that since she was held responsible when a letter got lost, she would also have the responsibility of changing the filing system. The system, she felt sure, was to blame.
One day when she was "on her lunch" and the editors didn't need cigarettes from the corner drugstore, she sat down and made an ANALYSIS of her problem. Curiously enough, she started at the end and WORKED BACKWARDS.